Seed

The days are long gone when sowing wild oats was even remotely on the agenda for yours truly. Sowing seed of wild-collected species peonies gets my heart racing about as fast as its safe to push the old ticker these days. November through to January are the months when seed catalogues arrive on the doorstep or via email and I can rarely resist ordering at least a handful of packets. If I know that some poor schmuck has slogged up a mountain in Tibet to collect the thing, I am particularly prone to buying it.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of planting all these seeds is the opportunity for vicarious travel it affords. In the photograph below there are seeds that were collected in Kazakhstan, Nepal, Japan and the USA. One minute you are at the source of the Irrawaddy, trousering a rare Arisaema, the next stooped over a propagating bench in Illinois, hand pollinating Amaryllis. Most of these seeds were collected in the 'wild', with considerable effort and virtually no hope of adequate financial compensation, by a handful of nutters who are, to put it politely, doing it for love. Others were sent to me by friends who collected the seed in their gardens or nurseries, from plants they think are particularly worth growing.

Some of these seeds will never germinate, either because they are dead-on-arrival or because I treat them in the wrong way, in my ignorance. Of those that germinate, however, some will be brand new to cultivation in the UK, never having been grown here in the past. Few sights give me more pleasure than a pot of seeds, collected in some distant land, germinating like cress in the spring. And who needs exercise when you can get all the cardiac stimulation you need in a packet.

More thrills than than a treadmill