Seed: A tiny miracle

And I'm planting lots now, to hell with what the seed packets say

Seeds of various plants. From top row, left to right: Row 1. Poppy, red pepper, strawberry, apple tree, blackberry, rice, carum. Row 2: Mustard, eggplant, physalis, grape, raspberry, red rice, patchouli. Row 3: Fig, lycium barbarum, beet, blueberry, golden kiwifruit, rosehip, basil. Row 4: Pink pepper, tomato, radish, carrot, matthiola, dill, coriander. Row 5: Black pepper, white cabbage, napa cabbage, seabuckthorn, parsley, dandelion, capsella bursa-pastoris. Row 6: Cauliflower, radish, kiwifruit, grenadilla, passionfruit, melissa, Tagetes erecta. Photo: Wikipedia.

It’s September 1 as I write this, the first day of spring. That’s the signal for people like me to crack open every seed packet within reach and begin strewing their contents on any available piece of open ground or soil-like medium, and to hell with any instructions that say “plant in late spring/early summer”.

Better people than I have written volumes on the promise of spring and its unfortunate habit of failing, sometimes disastrously, to deliver on that promise. I’m proud to report that six-plus decades on this planet have taught me nothing in this regard, and I continue to act as though the first ice-free day with a moderately blue-tinged sky means winter’s well and truly gone and in fact it’s now summer in all but name.

Today I have sown tomatoes, peppers and basil into seed trays, transplanted 44 globe artichoke seedlings into larger pots, and transplanted a bunch of Asian vegetable seedlings into our kitchen garden, where, if history is any guide, they will be gratefully and voraciously received by hordes of slugs and snails.

Seed is a word that can be traced all the way back to PIE, as you’d expect for something so fundamental to human survival. Middle English had sēd; Old English had sēd or saed, depending on what school you went to (Anglian or West Saxon); Proto-Germanic is believed to have had sediz, which gave Old Norse sað, Old Saxon sad, Old Frisian sed, Middle Dutch saet, Old High German sat, and German Saat. Before all of them, Latin had semen. All are thought to stem from the PIE se-ti (“sowing”), from the root sē (“to sow”). Like good seeds themselves, this is a word of prolific fecundity.

Seeds are miracles of nature. Before they evolved, plants (which only appeared on land a bit over 450 million years ago) reproduced using spores, as fungi continue to do today. But after 60 million or so years of this approach, the first seed-bearing plants popped up. Called gymnosperms, they lacked a protective coating (their name translates as “naked seed”). Next time you buy five grams of pine nuts, a key component of any respectable pesto, you can bask in the glow of being proud owner of a king’s ransom worth of gymnosperms.

Another 50 million or so years later nature developed enclosed seeds called angiosperms (the Greek angeion means “vessel”). What evolutionary advantage this conferred, I’m not sure, but if you’re a Darwinian, which I am, you can be sure it offered some advantage.

Botanists have a gazillion names to describe different seed shapes (from the prosaic bean-shaped to the wonderful subglobose - a word I defy you to say without sounding like King Charles delivering a speech from the throne). Seeds can also be divided into monocotyledons, such as grasses, palms, onions, leeks and the like, which produce a single seed leaf, to dicotyledons (zucchini, tomato, cucumbers), which produce two, to gymnosperms (again) that can produce multiple seed leaves. Cotton, which accounts for 80% of the world’s natural fibre production, is simply hairs (or trichomes) that burst from the cotton seed when it is ripe - ten to twenty thousand hairs per seed. Humans also plunder seeds for wood, paper, textiles (besides cotton), dyes, perfumes, medicines, and, of course, food. Not only is the word seed ridiculously productive, so are seeds themselves.

For many years, seed could also refer to offspring, a usage found throughout the Old Testament (see Genesis 17:7, for example) and in the name of one of my favourite groups, the Bad Seeds. The Old Testament is also famous for calling semen seed and warning men against the spilling on the ground thereof. I lived in fear of this ridiculous edict until my late teens; in fact, the fear continued some time after that, but the contest between it and the urge for carnal pleasure became increasingly one sided until the fear eventually disappeared. One thing about the Old Testament God, he takes an inordinate interest in what people do with the bits below the waist, who they do it with, and what positions they assume in the doing.

If you’re a tennis fan, you’ll also be familiar with seed as a term for players’ rankings at the beginning of a tournament. This usage appeared in 1898, the first time players’ names were spread, seed sowing style, to make sure the best players didn’t meet early in the tournament. The idea was the brainchild of Ralph Bagnall-Wild, who began life in 1845 as Ralph Kirkby before assuming his later - and admittedly grander - surname by royal licence in 1868. Surprisingly, Bagnall-Wild doesn’t rate a mention on the Wikipedia page on sports seeding. Seeding is now common in many major sports events, including the FIFA World Cup, America’s NFL and WNBA (but not the NBA), and the Rugby World Cup. The 2023 Rugby World Cup attracted well-deserved criticism for creating the seedings three years ahead of time. By 2023, the rankings were out of date and some teams - including New Zealand and Ireland - met earlier in the tournament than current form warranted. As a Kiwi, I was happy that the right team won what turned out to be perhaps the greatest quarter-final in history. But there’s no denying the game should have been a semi-final and that Ireland were denied a legitimate opportunity to advance further into the tournament than they’d ever achieved before.

One last note before I sign off. There are those who, quoting astronomical science, say spring doesn’t really arrive until the spring equinox - that day when the sun rises due east following winter. In the southern hemisphere, that’s around 23 September, another three weeks away. To those literal-minded killjoys, I say pffft. There’s a time for rigour and there’s a time to don your shorts and singlet, bare your lily-white arms and legs, and get sowing. Bugger the snow, bugger what the seed packets say and bugger the equinox: I must down to the garden again, to the lonely garden and the sky*.

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Bits and specious

* Adapted from John Masefield’s wonderful 1902 poem Sea-Fever. Many modern reproductions of the poem “correct” the opening line to “I must go down to the seas again”. Those who do this are wrong and barbaric. Have they no ear?

Most countries have no official start dates for the seasons. In New Zealand, for example, spring starts on September 1 if you’re a meteorologist; September 23 if you’re an astronomer; when the weather turns spring-like if you’re a gardener or outdoorsy type (the “when mother nature says it’s spring” approach); and if you’re a solar spring believer, it’s the period when daylight increases at the fastest rate. Meteorologists, who you’d think would be all sciency about this, like the first-of-the-month approach because it makes it much easier to record weather patterns over time in a way that everyone can follow. Clever them.

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Quote of the week

There is a very fine line between hobby and mental illness.
Dave Barry