Hey Dude, Who Moved My Gumnuts? (excerpt) Plant seeds are the most fascinating, wonderful things. They are nature’s way of making sure the next generation of plants can grow. They come in all shapes and sizes and plants have many different ways of spreading their seeds about. From the tiniest little alpine plant that barely peeks through the melting snow of the arctic or the Swiss Alps to mighty trees in the forest, some of which are thousands of years old, seeds are the key to their survival and their promise of future life. Plants create seeds in a variety of shapes, sizes and types and some are more vigorous than others are, in getting their seeds out into the world. For instance, the “double gee”, that horror of punctured bike tyres, thongs, car tyres and bare feet, makes its seed almost as soon as it has started growing and only the first two leaves can be seen. It will flower, go to seed and produce its three pronged fruit within a month of beginning to grow. Emex australi is also called spiny emex, three-cornered jack, cat-head, prickly jack, giant bull head, Tanner’s curse, bindii, or Cape spinach. It was brought to Australia from South Africa by early settlers to be used as a vegetable, hence its name Cape spinach. It soon went wild, is very hard to control and now infests millions of acres of paddocks in Australia and America. It is interesting that know what attaches itself to the sole of your shoe or sticks into your foot is not a seed – but the fruit. Its seeds, inside their little three-pronged capsule will remain viable for up to fifteen years, so getting rid of them in paddocks and pasture is a long-term job. From the fleshy fruits we love to eat, like oranges and cherries with the seeds completely inside, to those with their hard, seed bearing cases (like Banksia) that we scarcely regard as “fruit”, plants protect their precious seeds with different sorts of coverings.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 02:03:05 +0000
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