Presumably you have put together a bunch of good wildlife photos this long weekend. Well, we need ’em, so please send them in. Thanks!
Today’s batch comes from Rik Gern of Austin, Texas, who sends us photos of seeds and seed pods. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
I’ve got some seeds and seed pods for you today. The pictures of seed pods were taken on a walk around the block last January before the plants were in bloom:
Crape Myrtle (Lagersrtoemia ‘Natchez’) is usually known by its extravagant frilly, petticoat-like flowers, but here are the rustic seed pods. (1&2) They are not as flamboyant as the flower, but attractive in their own right.
The pointed tips of the Red Yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) pods make them a good companion to the rest of the plant with it’s stiff, aggressively pointed leaves. (3) The seeds in these pods are just starting to get exposed.
Unlike the Crepe Myrtle and the Red Yucca, the pods of the Mexican Buckeye (Ungnadia speciosa) hang down from the branch. They make me think of some ancient bells. The smooth polished look of the seeds contrasts nicely with the rough hewn, weathered look of the pod casing:
The next two examples come straight from the grocery store.
Here are a few seeds from a Red Delicious apple (Malus domestica). Their host was delicious!:
These Cantaloupe Melon (Cucumis melo) seeds (first photo below) made me think of textbook illustrations I saw of cell division when I was in school, so I did some digital daydreaming in the multiverse called Photoshop and played around until this emerged. I call it “Kaleidoscopic Mitosis” (second photo below):
Great pix and a lovely transformation! My mom collected similar seed pods and then drew them, so this was a nice remembrance for me.
Very nice! Coincidentally, yesterday I plucked about 100 seeds from last year’s Allium schubertii flowers from our garden. Your seed pod pictures remind me of how the Allium seeds form. These plants produce unbelievably spectacularly huge Allium flowers.
Normal people grow them from bulbs, but it possible to grow them from seeds. The first step is wrap the seeds in a moist paper towel, put them into a sealable sandwich bag, and refrigerate the seeds for a month. Then (Oy!) they need to be removed from the refrigerator and put into special soil held at 70 degrees F. to encourage germination. Once germinated, the little plants need to be nurtured for up to three years in controlled conditions before they will form bulbs large enough to plant or give away. It’s surprising that bulbs are not very expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_schubertii
A nice trip thru seed pods.
Was the cantaloupe art done thru a photoshop filter, or painted by hand and by whimsy with digital brushes?
Photoshop filters, mostly polar coordinates & liquify for the shapes, and then doing an inverse on one layer and playing with the blending sliders. Then painting in different color, light, saturation, etc. adjustment layers over each of the image layers, sometimes all layers together, sometimes individually, and doing the same with the liquify filter. There are at least five image layers, and possibly more, but I lost track of the process and didn’t save the layered version.
I love photoshop. I love your pictures, too! What kind of camera do you use?
Thanks. I’m using a Panasonic DC-GX9, and mostly an Olympus ED 60mm f2.8 Macro lens.
Fantastic photos. Psychedelics taught me that there’s incredible beauty in places we don’t ever suspect, or previously we’d thought of as marginal and disposable.
Like seeds/pods.
Thank you!
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Nice photos!
The variation in plant seeds/seed pods astonishing. This year for the first time I tried growing Cucumber Magnolias (Magnolia acuminata) from a solitary tree in my yard that is being pollinated from an unknown tree. The trees get huge but grow from tiny little seeds less than the size of an ordinary green bean seed. They appear as orange seeds in gherkin-sized green pods. The orange coating prevents germination and has to be removed, and it’s oily, so the seeds need to be washed in soapy water to remove all the oil. Then they need to be “stratified” in moist peat over the winter in a refrigerator, without freezing. And desiccation at any point is fatal.
One guy online said that he had planted 50 seeds and only had two seedlings to show for it. I currently have 9/11 that are robust + one that’s barely surviving, so I’m pretty happy about this outcome.
(If Lou Jost sees this, the whole bit about removing the seed coat suggests that some animal eats the seeds in the wild, with successful germination from exiting scat. Is that the accepted explanation?)