Growing a Garden from Seeds
- Our propagation area under a Monkey Pod tree.
- Seeds of a rare desert plant.
- Agave parryi, about 3 weeks old.
- A gold vine from Australia, ready to be potted up.
- Anthuriums needing a few more weeks before they can go out in the wild.
- A pot of tiny noni trees
- Thaumatophyllum bipinnatafidam. Easy for you to say.
- Stephanotis floribunda, fragrant vine.
- Cat Palms, one of our favorites, since it stays small.
- More noni trees.
- Rare palms from the Big Island.
- Philodendron gloriosum
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course, all gardens had their beginning in the miracle of the seed. But the monastery’s recent bout with Hurricane Lowell has returned our thoughts to the importance and the promise of seeds. Not that we are oblivious to that fact, but it takes on new significance as we contemplate replanting devastated areas of Siva’s Sacred Gardens.
We begin today’s reflections with the two seeds above. One is Aerides odorata, an orchid famous for having one of the tiniest seeds in the plant world. Amazingly, 3.4 million seeds weigh a mere gram (1/28th of an ounce). The other is a coco de mer (Lodoicea maldivica), a single seed of which can weigh 25 kg, or 55 pounds.
By weight, that means it takes about 85 billion Aerides odorata seeds to equal the weight of one very large coco de mer seed!
Yet virtually every living cell in a seed contains the plant’s complete genetic instruction set, encoded in DNA so extraordinarily thin that it cannot be seen by the unaided human eye.
Within those tiny spiraling molecules lies Siva’s User’s Manual for making the plant. In the coconut palm, that genetic manual contains about 2.4 billion base pairs. If we take each base pair as a single letter of the English alphabet and print the User’s Manual in 12-point type on 7 × 10-inch pages, the entire manual would fill about 6,000 books of 200 pages each.
As amazing as that is, the User Manual for the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), with its vastly larger genome, would require roughly 70,000 such books!
That’s how much information Siva encodes in the DNA of a seed. Talk about efficiency!
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