SEEDS THAT LIVE FOR CENTURIES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18725, 1 December 1922, Page 8

SEEDS THAT LIVE FOR CENTURIES.

THE PERSISTENT POPPY. Woodlands cleared of timber during the war are now covered with thickets of gorse and bramble. This is particularly noticeable in South Hertfordshire, where you will to-day find acres of gorse where gorse has not grown before, perhaps, in centuries. Where did the seed come from? That’is a question that is puzzling naturalists. It is a question that is always chopping up, and for which it is very difficult to find an answer. As every gardener knows, there are ’many seeds—such, for instance, as parsnip—which are useless if kept over one year. They lose their life-principle and will not germinate. Other seeds, such as peas and beans, keep their life much longer, but most farmers declare that all seed more than fiveryears old is useless. Yet cases constantly crop up which go to show that some seeds can retain their vitality over greater periods of time. See tlie way in which all sorts of plants, hitherto unknown in a district, appear upon the sides of new railway embankments. Notice how, when a forest of one kind of tree is cut down or burnt, the new growth is usually an entirely different species. In the Southern States of America the yellow upland pine is always succeeded by black-jack oak, while in Maine the spruce _ is followed by wild cherry and white birch. Some land at Abbeville, • in France, which had been under water for at least two centuries, was drained. No sooner was this done than a wood of young alders sprang up, although this tree was previously unknown in the district. We have no choice but to believe that the seed must somehow have survived in the mud under the w r ater. Here is an even stranger case of seedsurvival. Some forty-five vears ago it was discovered that tho slag-heaps of the ancient silver mines at Lauriuim, in Greece,

were veil worth working. As soon as the refuse was removed there sprang up from the soil beneath a pretty yellow poppy of the genus Glaucium. Now, this poppy was described by Pliny and Dioscorides, but had since disappeared completely, and atHhe time of its reappearance was unknown to botany.