THE MIGHTY SEED

Rex Burress

There are about 10,000 species of Poa's in the world, and some are drifters, sending their hopes to the wind, while others hitchhike their way to some anchorage conductive to growth.

You may surmise that I am thinking about grass!The Greeks called the grass family Poa, or Poaceae, whose seeds, like all seeds, are endowed with a dictum to spread and multiply. The dispersal systems that plants use to spread their seeds is amazingly varied among the approximately 300,000 plant species on Earth, and grasses are no exception except the flowers are unspectacular since they depend on wind for pollination instead of attracting insects.

Interestingly, most grasses are hermaphroditic, except for corn, yet need the wind-pollination crossovers. The seed, or fruit, of grass is called a caryopsis, and the grass-blades grow from the base for easy replacement. The process evolved from being eaten by grazing animals. Trampling by grazers started about 66 million years ago, and can kill seedling trees, but not grass.

Along Hammon Street in Oroville, a lovely fuzzy purple grass grows along the sidewalk, the arching stems spread out like an umbrella, and I stopped to feel the bristles that resemble bottle brush. The seed heads were in the final stages of dispersing, and each segment was of the parachute variety, breaking loose easily to deliver its passenger afar...a life force no larger than a grain of sand attached to its carrier.

I discovered it to be a Fountaingrass from Africa, Pennisetum setaceum, one of the decorative grasses popular in landscaping. The clump resembles local foxtail grass-heads on a larger, softer, scale, and the long stems are drooped like native deer grass, but they are not designed to impale your pants or a dog's nose with spiny tenacity.

Grass species help support animal life on earth, especially the domestic cereal crops in the wheat-oats-barley-corn-rice cultivation system, while other species offer forage for herbivores. The lawn grasses tolerate consistent mowing when watered while the taller types, such as fountaingrass, are attractive for border display additions.

Even though bamboo and sugarcane are grasses, cattail is not, in spite of the long, grass-like blades. Neither is the long, artistic strands of grass-like eel grass of the sea that drapes loose stems on wave-washed sandy beaches like a master artist.

We know that some of the garden seeds that we plant are very small, like lettuce, but seeds of the tallest trees in the world--our own coast redwoods, are even smaller. The black, pepper-sized seeds come from the small conifer cone entirely out of proportion to the tree and beyond expectations! A wheat seed is hundreds of times larger. To think that such ponderous future redwood bulk could be contained in a speck of a seed is almost beyond belief, yet, even an elephant was created from a microscopic-sized sperm cell uniting with a female egg, not unlike the pollination of a flower!

The wonder of a seed, or an egg, is that the spark of life is packed into a spectacularly small space within the immensity of Earth and the Universe.

“We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from...Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things returned dissolved into their elements.” --William Shakespeare

“The seeds of the future lie buried in the past.” --Optimus Prime

“We have seen Indians in immense numbers, and all those on this coast of the Pacific

contrive to make a good subsistence on various seeds...” --Junipero Serro 1700's