The secret life of seeds: The little wonders that sustain all life on Earth

Now, place on your palm a conker or a grain of wheat, an avocado pip. Clasp it. Always the hard physicality, but also the sense of potency, so definite as to be tangible. Seeds. The beginning of life for plants of all types, whether the humble wildflower that is herb Robert, fixed in the crack alongside an English garden path, the sky-scraping redwood trees of California or the floating lotus flower of Chinese lakes.

Seeds: they come in as many forms as there are grains of sand on a beach. The biggest seed belongs to the coco-de-mer palm of the Seychelles, weighing in at three stone. The seeds of foxglove are smaller than a grain of sand and so light in weight that 10,000 put on the kitchen scales would register only 0.035oz.

Seeds: their strange beauties, their outlandish oddities. The seed of the blue cornflower resembles a miniature shaving brush, suitable for gnomes, whereas the seed of scabious is a ballet dancer in a crêpe tutu and the water chestnut of Asia an eerie ram’s head. The sea bean of Central America is a perfect heart, the Japanese lantern does, indeed, put one in mind of an Oriental lampshade. A wrinkly woody walnut is a hard nut to crack, yet the scarlet and black seeds of the bush bean Phaseolus vulgaris are painted egg-shell miniatures. Or cartographs of lost worlds.

The seed of strawberry is a nondescript dot, but oh, the luscious red flesh on which it is studded. If the variety of seeds is myriad, they are, botanically, all the same perfect package: embryo, stored food, protective seed coat. The ‘radicle’ of the embryo grows the roots, the ‘plumule’ grows into leaf, stem and seed. There are two types of plants that produce seeds: gymnosperms (such as the conifer family), the seeds of which are exposed (from the Greek gymnos, ‘naked’, and sperma, ‘seed’), and angiosperms, or flowering plants, with seeds protected by fruits (from angeion, meaning ‘vessel’). Whether gymnosperm or angiosperm, the seed has an inbuilt genetic programme. From little acorns oaks do grow, not marigolds or mangroves. Botanical teleology.

Now sit outside, in a park or garden, field or forest, stream or seaside. Regard the ground, the bushes, the trees, the water. Seeds: they are everywhere. Latent: waiting, waiting to grow, waiting to seize the opportunity to expand their living space. There are many wonderful things about seeds, but surely their ingenious stratagems to disperse themselves are greatest? Take the coconut, round and hollow like a football, with a waterproof wadding to keep it afloat on the surface of water. Nature’s own life buoy, the coconut has traversed the seas since the dawn of time, so profusely scattering its nuts along the coasts of continents that no one knows its true place of origin.

If the coconut prefers to float away on the waves, air travel is the choice of many seed types. Some seeds are so minute — those of St John’s wort, a healing herb, are 43 times smaller than a grain of sand — that a mere puff of breeze will simply and effectively carry them to destinations new. Other air travellers use sophisticated technology, the dandelion a case in point. Each of the 200 seeds in the familiar dandelion seedball ‘clock’ is attached to a parachute. The dispersal of the seeds is not accidental, but triggered by physics and weather conditions (hot weather, with uplifting air, being good, cold, wet weather being a drag). Once airborne, the real miracle of dandelion aeronautics commences: the very structure of the feathery seed creates a swirling vortex of low pressure above its head, which sucks the seed upwards for a longer flight.

Of course, many dandelions receive human assistance. Children have likely been blowing on dandelion puffballs forever — or at least since ancient Greece, when puffing at the globe of Taraxacum officinale carried wishes to the gods. Other seeds quite literally get a grip on passing mammalia by attaching to their fur with spikes and hooks. This is how wild oats sow themselves. Eventually, these stow-away seeds are deposited by their unsuspecting ride any place, any time. Birds frequently play delivery boy and girl to seeds; mistletoe berries are a thrush’s favourite meal in bleak midwinter and, after a brief visit to the digestive tract, the seeds emerge, held together in a bead-chain, on a convenient convenience of a tree, where they germinate. Jays bury acorns in earth larders. Some acorns become forgotten, to sprout as saplings. It is entirely possible that jays planted half the oakwood of Britain.

Then there are seeds that are capable of self-locomotion, such as the common stork’s-bill, a pretty pink flower of grassland. Erodium cicutarium’s screw-shape seed shrinks in dryness and expands in humidity, the consequence being that it drills itself into the earth. Veritably, it is a self-seeding seed. In a competitive category, the blue gum tree takes the title for the most mind-boggling dispersal system. This member of the eucalyptus genus releases flammable oils to prompt forest fires to raze the arboreal opposition. In the heat of the moment, the flame-retardant blue gum then releases its own seeds onto the cleared ground. Such stunts can’t fail to capture the imagination; a superb child’s guide, complete with coloured illustrations of artistic vividity, to the marvels of the world’s seeds and their dispersal methods is Cruschiform’s Seeds: Nature’s Intrepid Miracles (Prestel, £22.50).

Seeds. Adverts for miraculous Nature and her bounty. We have been living on our daily bread, developed from einkorn wheat, barley and emmer wheat, for more than 10,000 years. The ancient Greeks, as did the other old civilisations, understood the fundamentality of seed: in Hellenic rituals worshipping Demeter, goddess of harvest and fruitfulness, poppy seeds were an altar item, as their numerousness suggested the goddess’ own fertility and fecundity. (Break open the salt-shaker pod of the common poppy, watch more than 1,000 specky black seeds cascade out and you will understand the Greeks’ choice of oblation.) Hades trapped the goddess Persephone in the Underworld by tricking her into eating pomegranate seeds. She was then condemned to spend one-third of the year in Hades’ darkness, the remainder above ground with her mother, Demeter. And so, it came about that the Earth has its seasons.

Now plant a seed in earth and allow the forces of sun and water to perform their ordained roles. From the statis of the seed will emerge, via metamorphosis, a growing plant. ‘Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders,’ said the great American naturalist Henry David Thoreau. He was correct and those wonders sustain life on Earth.

This feature originally appeared in the October 8, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe'