Generation gains

Humans are well used to appreciating the beauty of flowers, and breeding them to heighten their attractions but we remain largely ignorant of their seeds, something that can also be of stunning beauty, although often on an microscopic scale. A new book, Seeds: Time Capsules of Life, hopes to help redress this perception and raise awareness of conservation issues at a time of unprecedented pressure on plant stocks. The history of plant life on land extends back almost 600 million years and, across that great span of time, the origin of the seed stands out as one of the key A new book reveals the extraordinary forms of the seeds of many plants, often adapted to disperse their parent species. Generation gains innovations that allowed plants to expand and diversify across the Earth’s surface. Provisioned with food reserves, and with the ability to lie dormant before producing the next generation, seeds endowed plants with the capacity to survive temporary hardships and created new opportunities for plants to move from place to place. Every seed is a time capsule that adds to the resilience and mobility of the life cycles of plants: two properties that have had profound, long-term effects on the evolution of life on the planet. In a new book, Robert Kessler and Wolfgang Stuppy provide a lively account of seeds and their significance, while at the same time illuminating their beauty and diversity through a series of stunning images. The intricacy of these exquisite natural forms often only seen at a microscopic scale, “highlights the extraordinary creativity of nature, and at the same time it is a reminder of how little we truly understand about the structure, biology and ecology of even the most common plants”, says botanist, Sir Peter Crane. Over the broad sweep of evolutionary time, the resilience of seeds, that same feature that helps plants survive the harshest cold, the longest droughts and the darkest of polar winters, has imparted a degree of inbuilt extinction resistance. In natural seed banks, seeds can survive for many decades. In the ideal conditions of man-made seed banks this can be extended for centuries. “The Millennium Seed Bank, and other seed banks around the world, already provide insurance against human-induced extinction for tens of thousands of different plants”, says Crane. “It is to be hoped that these efforts will be extended and accelerated