Propagation and Cultivation info. on wiki
Jane McGary (Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:26:52 PDT)

Mary Sue wrote regarding putting seed raising information on the wiki,
"And if Jane has something she has already done that we could

The article in question, "Raising a bulb collection from seed,"
appeared in Rock Garden Quarterly 65(3) (summer 2007), an issue
largely devoted to growing plants from seed. I found the Word file
for the article but it doesn't exist as a separate pdf. If somebody
would like to tell me how to make a pdf from a Word file, I can do
that. I've never bothered to learn because someone else does it on
all the publications I work on.

If you have a broader interest in seed raising and saving, you can
buy a back issue from the NARGS Book Service at
http://www.nargs.org/

The next issue, 65(4), also has some articles on seed raising.

A cumulative index to the entire run of the NARGS Bulletin/Quarterly
is now complete and should be online at that site soon, if not already.

Just to comment on techniques: Some of the techniques described for
germinating seed seem to be aimed more at testing viability than at
actually raising mature plants. I've always felt that germinating
seeds on damp paper or in bags of vermiculite in the refrigerator,
and then transferring the germinated ones to a growing medium in a
pot, is likely to kill a lot of incipient plants. It's probably best
suited to very large seeds that can be handled by an amateur without
damaging the emerging radicle. (I just transplanted some Styrax
obassia seedlings at this stage successfully, but the seeds are about
the size of large garden peas.)

Some techniques will induce germination but not necessarily result in
healthy plants. This has been observed often in seedlings germinated
with the aid of GA-3; in some genera, the resulting seedlings are
etiolated and do not mature properly. Moreover, the chemicals needed
for some treatments may be daunting for amateurs to handle outside
the laboratory. Despite having taken a couple of years of lab courses
in college long ago, I would not use sulphuric acid at home; I think
even the highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide recommended for some
seeds can be hazardous.

One of the most important things to learn about seeds is how dry
storage affects a given species (this can vary even within a genus,
e.g. in Fritillaria and Erythronium). It may increase germination
success, decrease it, eliminate it, or trigger an extended dormancy
period -- or have no apparent effect. Furthermore, whatever rule is
discovered by experimentation, as in the studies reported by Norman
Deno, it's possible that a few individual seeds will break that rule.
Thus, even though I'm told by the literature that planting Adonis
seed is hopeless if it's not fresh, I do it anyway, and have obtained
a very few plants that way; it's worth the expense and effort,
because I have no other way of getting plants in this genus in the
USA. It isn't useful to obtain and plant seed of a common species
that is known to have low storage viability (e.g., Fritillaria
meleagris, Aconitum napellus), because you can easily get it some
other way. But if you want a rare species with probably short
viability (e.g., Fritillaria japonica, Aconitum krylovii), the long
shot is worth it.

Jane McGary
Northwestern Oregon, USA