Hope blooms eternal

When I was a teenager I was given a copy of the wonderful first edition of America's Garden Book by Laura Bush-Brown and James Bush-Brown. This book has been a frequent companion in the more than half-century since. One of the things I learned from this book is that seeds of garden plants have a life span. As a youngster it fascinated me that seeds might live for five or six years and still grow when planted. To a teenager, five or six years is an eternity.

On page 975 of that book begins a four-plus page listing of the longevity of seeds. Since I was already collecting and accumulating a seed bank back then, I found this list indispensable. It was the beginning of a life-long fascination with the performance of old seeds. For the last twenty or more years seed here has been stored in the refrigerator (or in much smaller numbers in the freezer). And there are plenty of seed packets, mostly of home grown seed, which have been kept at room temperature for decades.

When I get bored in the middle of winter, I sometimes take out the plastic bags in which the seed packets are stored and go over the packets. The commercial packets, with their vivid colors, are an art form of their own. This always cheers me up. And while I'm enjoying the colorful seed packets, I select a few to test the germination of the seed. This year I selected some seed of Tropaeolum peregrinum, the Canary bird flower, a type of nasturtium. This seed was from a commercial  packet offered for sale in 1996, so the seed was at least fourteen years old. I tested three seeds: on January 20, 2011 I soaked the seeds overnight, then packed them in damp tissue paper in a plastic bag. By now, one shows active growth, another is just beginning to show growth, and the third is still dormant (or dead).  In the image above you can see these three; there is also a fourth seed of another type of nasturtium from 1981 - this one has so far showed no sign of germination.

Seed packets have become so expensive now that it pays to keep unsown seed from year to year. If you budget the amount you intend to spend on seeds each year, storing unsown seed will allow you to keep to the same budget and still buy different seeds each year. 

Torenia ‘Clown Blue’

I’ve been growing Torenia fournieri off and on since I was a kid. In recent years the old seed grown typical form has been replaced by seed grown strains such as the ‘Clown’ series. In my experience these have a tendency to produce the occasional deformed flower, but they are bigger than the plants I remember from my childhood.

The first edition of the wonderful Bush-Brown America’s Garden Book had good things to say about Torenia fournieri, and that’s what got me started with it. I used to save home grown seed (produced by the zillion as it were) and sow it on the ground in the late spring. The resulting plants did not come into bloom until well into the summer, but they were care free from sowing until they were cut by frost.

Now I’m a bit ashamed to say I buy a few plants each year from growers of bedding plants. They are well worth having for their cool colors, interesting form and sturdy poise. And they have a curious trick they perform if you know how to get them to do it. The stigma has two flaps; touch the inside of the flaps gently and the flaps will slowly begin to close up over the “pollen” you have deposited there with your touch. This is the sort of thing a high-minded Victorian parent would have taught the children.