Making Native Plants

Ah Yes, hunting and gathering

There is something primal about this activity that makes me feel connected to the world around me.  This is a task I saved for myself out of all of the work it takes to make native plants at a native plant nursery.  As the farm expanded and other people joined us,  here I am after 23 years collecting an early spring fruiting of silver maple in Iowa.

Who is this seed collector and what can he say about the world around us.

I am biologist but not until season after season, following the cycle of flowering, fruiting then the harvest did I so fully understand this living planet.

I am competitor with the flock of Flickers noisily feasting on hawthorne fruits in the same tree with me, so close, I can hear their feathers rustle.

I am shaman giving thanks to this tree for its bounty. In my mind telling tree I have selected her children to represent your kind at our farm. Because I know every individual is different everywhere and this tree is best suited this place by gift of inheritance.

I am seed collector who knows plants are not distributed by random in nature and understands to find  places to plant these seedlings where they will thrive

These are the growers who do much more than throw seed into the ground. When I started there were no books to tell me how to sow each of the hundreds of different native plants kinds I wanted to grow.                                                                                               Trees and shrubs and perennials and grasses of aquatic of salt flat and of sand dunes each with their own genetic heritage telling their embryo when to begin to imbibe water and send out that  tiny root growing down to locate nutrients and microbial partners supported by stored energy in the seed.

Now we know some of our plants will grow whenever placed in warm moist ground, just like corn.
Some seeds can be stored dry for many years others rapidly lose viability on drying.
Some seeds will never grow unless they spend a period in winter, moist cool conditions and others need a summer and a winter dispelling chemical inhibitors or allowing the embryo to finish ripening,
and some will never grow unless their thick coating is etched in an animal gut by acids or blistered in a fire.Lastly there are those it seems we will never come to understand or perhaps they change from year to year in their germination requirements.


And you know this is the fun and the joy of learning to grow these native plants