The Seeds of Wild Flowers

P. L. RICKER.

OUTSIDE the city limits is a bounty of Nature for all to enjoy. A bounty free, colorful, rewarding. A bounty that gives and gives and wants only protection against destruction. A bounty all the more precious in a civilization of pavements, machines, noise, economics.

It is the bounty of wild plants. It is a large bounty: Probably about 20 thousand species of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous nonwoody plants in the United States are classified as wild. About 15 percent are well-established species that came from other countries or escaped from cultivation. Most of them are herbaceous. A goodly number have leaves and flowers so attractive that many persons want to grow them in home gardens, along roadsides, and in other suitable places, large and small.

Some natural difficulties, which pertain also to cultivated plants and involve the age-long adaptation to a particular soil, the amount of moisture, sunlight, heat, and so on, are encountered when one tries to domesticate the wildlings. Growing them is worth the effort, however.

Knowing that, many persons want information about sources of seed of wild flowers.

There are a few dealers in seeds of wild flowers, but not all of them have a large number of species. Their catalogs usually give directions for cultivation. A list of them may be obtained from the U.S. National Arboretum, Washington 25, D.C.

Small packets of seeds of wild flowers sell for 25 to 50 cents each. Packets of mixtures for broadcasting may sell for 2 or 3 dollars an ounce. Many of the seeds are so small that an ounce may contain 1 thousand or more.

Dealers sometimes find that the high cost of time, labor, and travel to collect a large amount and variety of seeds from the wild often makes such work unprofitable unless they use seeds first to establish gardens, where their collecting can be done at small cost.

Wild flower enthusiasts will get a great deal of pleasure from collecting their own seed. Many beautiful non- weedy species may be found along roadsides, and particularly secondary roads, and adjoining fields near pastures and wooded areas.

SEEDS mostly can be collected about a month after the flowering period. Each kind, with stem and often basal leaves to help identify the species, should be placed in an envelope or paper bag of an appropriate size. On the envelope also, as a guide to proper planting, should be the date and place of collecting; the type of soil, whether dry, moist, or wet; and details of the surroundings, whether open or dense woods and the predominant type of tree growth.

Seed capsules and pods, if few, can be stripped from the stems. The seed in them can be crushed out by hand or on a newspaper on a table by light pounding with a small block of wood.

For a larger amount of seeds, the threshing is best done by light pounding in a large paper or cloth bag, in which they were collected. The seeds will fall to the bottom of the bag and most of the coarse material can be removed readily.

For further cleaning, a series of sieves 10 by 10 by 2 inches (or larger, if needed) is easily made with 114-inch wood frames. Screen material may be obtained from hardware stores in galvanized, copper, or brass wire, in a mesh of 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 30 wires to the inch.

For cleaning, the sieves are stacked with the No. 30 mesh at the bottom and the No. 4 at the top. For shaking seeds through the sieve, these stacks should be held together with an easily loosened, strong cord or strap. Coarse material in the top sieve should be removed. Any uncrushed capsules or pods in the sieve should be placed on a newspaper on a table and the seed crushed out of them. The same is done with each succeeding smaller sieve.

The seeds of most wild flowers vary so in size that seeds may be found in sieves of two or three sizes. Often seeds in the smallest sieve may be immature and will give less good germination than the larger seeds. For home use, however, they may be mixed with the larger ones.

One who collects seeds should not overlook those with fleshy coverings. The covering can be removed by soaking the seed in warm water for 10 or 15 minutes. Then the seeds are placed in a sieve with a mesh smaller than the seeds. The coating is scrubbed off with a stiff-bristled or wire brush. This process is not required in Nature, as the covering naturally disintegrates after planting.

Keeping a collection of samples of all seeds of wild flowers one obtains is an interesting hobby. One becomes familiar with the many types of seed found in some families and often with two or three types of seed in a genus.

Small seeds are best kept in straight-walled glass vials 3/8 by 1 3/4 inches in size with cork stoppers. The Latin name of the species should be printed on 1/2- by 2-inch gummed labels with the date and place of collecting and reference to the herbarium specimen, if one keeps a herbarium. The label should be pasted around the top of the vial. The vials are kept in shallow boxes about 11 by 17 inches that have 4 rows of 25 cardboard partitions. Larger seeds are placed in larger vials in deeper boxes that have 54 or 26 compartments. The larger seeds may be kept loose in boxes with 18 compartments.

A large collection of seeds of mostly native plants in the United States is that of the Department of the Interior, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, at Laurel, Md. It has about 7,500 species. Particular attention is given species that are used as food by birds and game.

Scientists for many years conducted extensive studies on the food preferences of birds, as indicated by an examination of their stomachs. From this and other sources, a large catalog of plants whose seeds are food for birds was compiled. Among them are a number of attractive wild flowers, although most are seeds and fleshy fruits of shrubs and trees. Seeds of small-flowered and abundant weedy plants, grasses, and grasslike plants supplied a large proportion of bird food.

The Wild Flower Preservation Society of Washington, D.C., also has a large collection of about 5 thousand species. It stresses the more attractive flowered herbaceous ones, and probably has at least 2 thousand species that are not in the Patuxent collection.

MOST WILD seeds ripen and fall to the ground about a month after flowering. Those that are light or have wings or hairy appendages are blown some distance by the wind before falling.

A few species, particularly of annuals or biennials, like the daisy-fleabane and fringed gentian, may germinate and develop leaf rosettes in the fall.

Seeds of wild flowers in most temperate regions require one winter in the ground before germinating. If they do not get the right conditions of moisture and temperature to germinate the following spring, they may go dormant and not germinate until conditions are right maybe another year or two.

Some wild flowers are difficult to establish if the roots are disturbed in transplanting. The seeds of such species should be planted in a small, tough, fiber paper pot, which is to be placed in the ground in the spring when the seedlings are 3 or 4 inches tall or long. When seeds are broadcast along roadsides that are covered with more aggressive vegetation, the seedling plants may be choked out. The same may happen if they are broadcast in woodland areas.

Much better results will be obtained if the ground is cleared and a good seedbed is prepared. Along some roadsides in Texas, the State highway department has obtained good results by mowing areas of attractive flowers just before the seed is fully ripe and spreading this material along roadsides not too thickly covered with other vegetation.

For home gardens it is best to sow the seed of wild flowers in the fall in about 3-inch-deep boxes of soil, which are placed in glass and lath-covered cold frames. Seedling plants can be transplanted in the spring when they are about 3 or 4 inches tall.

SOME WILD FLOWERS have a marked preference for soils that are loamy or sandy, dry to damp or wet, acid to alkaline, and open to dense woodland conditions. When you collect your own seeds, these conditions of natural growth should be noted on your package.

Inexpensive soil-testing sets are available that give a list of soil preferences for 500 species of plants. In time, you should learn to tell the soil reaction from the plants growing there. Areas of pine, fir, spruce, hemlock, rhododendron, mountain laurel, and oak vary from slightly to strongly acid, depending on the decomposed leaves.

Some books on the cultivation of wild flowers list the soil preferences of many species.

A list follows of some of the more popular and attractive flowered species across the country. Some have been photographed on a glass slide ruled into square millimeters (a millimeter being approximately one twenty-fifth of an inch), so that one can determine the size of the seed before enlargement. Brief descriptions of some seeds not illustrated are given with common names when they exist in the standard manuals of botany. The photographs appear at the end of the first picture section.

Seeds of most wild flowers of the six geographic areas given below grow well in the average conditions of soil, light, and moisture of each area and habitat of each species, unless otherwise noted or given in catalogs and books on the subject.

NORTHEASTERN SPECIES Meadow anemone (Anemone canadensis). The plants prefer damp thickets or meadows and in gardens should have partial shade. The seeds are thin, broadly oval, and about 4 x 4 mm. They have a curved beak as long as the seed.

Wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis). The plants prefer wooded or open rocky areas. In some of its range, blossoms appear from spring to late fall. They do well in partly shaded gardens. The elliptic or pear-shaped seeds are glossy black and about 2 mm. long.

Butterfly-weed (Asclepius tuberosa). The seeds are thin, brown, pear shaped, and about 5 x 7 mm. long and have a tuft of about 20 mm. white hairs at the top for distribution by wind. The plants eventually develop a large, spindle-shaped root 2 to 3 feet deep in the ground.

Marshmarigold (Caltha palustris). A native of wet meadows, open woods, and swamps which in the garden must have similar conditions. In a small water garden the 1 x 2.5 mm., elliptic to pear-shaped, brown seeds should be planted a quarter of an inch deep in the wet margin, or in a pot that can be kept constantly wet until ready for transplanting.