If you love plants, coming home from a trip with a bunch of seeds and plants in tow is like adding an extra day to your vacation.
Like an 8 year old back from trick-or-treating with a cache of Halloween candy, you spread your bounty out over the kitchen table and sort through what you got. After making some quick strategic plans, it’s off to the local garden store to buy some extra seed trays and plastic domes to get started.
Out of the dozens of types of plants I got though the USDA inspection in Hawaii, I feel relatively confident I can grow all but few. The philodendron vines and Monstera are notoriously easy to propagate from stem cuttings, even in plain water. I have two types of Crinum asiaticum (spider lily) seeds, which I’ve grown before and know they’re basically foolproof. Croton cuttings are also fairly easy to root in soil or water, although one of my cuttings is looking pretty wilted after shipping and I’m not sure if it will make it.
One species I’m less sure about are the Spathodea campanulata seeds, known commonly as the African tulip tree, which reportedly have low germination rates. The pod I found on a tree growing next to a parking lot in Kona contained what looked like thousands of seeds—a dense, loose mass of flat, lightweight seeds, each imbedded in a thin cellophane-like sheet of tissue. Even the slightest breeze scatters the ultra-lightweight seeds into the air, where they flutter around like mosquitos. (This was an annoyance to the group I traveled with, when a swarm sparkly seeds blasted out of the pod on the dash and into the cab when the air conditioner came on.)
The seeds are plentiful and extremely gregarious travelers, but this plant’s reproduction strategy to is to produce its seeds en masse and allow them to spread far, with lower emphasis on each one’s viability. I’m worried there’s a chance the entire batch dried out too much while it was still on the tree and none will sprout.
I’m also less sure about the single, grape-sized seed pod I found in a refuse pile in the Maka’eo walking path garden at the old Kona airport (an amazing garden to visit if you are ever in the vicinity, by the way). I thought I knew what it was—I initially thought it was a Euphorbia neohumbertii—but now I’m looking that species up and having some doubts my ID was correct. In any case, the three seeds, which fit snugly in the three-chambered pod and have hard casings that resemble pine nuts, seem like they might be temperamental when it comes to watering the right amount. (An aside: these gardens are amazing place to visit if you are interested in looking at a wide range of tropical plants and succulents. But, though the gardens are unguarded, please don’t pluck any attached plant parts or take out any fallen fruit or other useful material. The gardens are maintained by local people, and theft of valuable plants and food crops has been a problem there).
Finally, I have some seeds from an Aloe of some sort that was absolutely covered in open pods, and a sandwich bag of seeds rom a large planting of Stapelia (also known as “carrion flower”) in Kona that was spewing its cottony fluff all over the sidewalk and beyond. The Stapelia pods look remarkably similar to those of milkweeds, as do the seeds themselves, so I looked the genus up and found Stapelia comes from the same subfamily as milkweed, Asclepiadoideae.
(It’s fascinating, the connections you can make when you know a bit about taxonomy. You can walk into a new environment, knowing hardly anything about the plant species there, and quickly identify a bunch of plants with Google by searching your location + the plant family or genus a specimen seems to belong to).
In any case, I have never grown Aloe nor Stapelia from seed, and sometimes these drought-loving plants can be temperamental to water properly in shallow trays. So we’ll see what happens.
I’ve been fascinated by the seeds from a Delonix regia tree, also known as royal ponciana or flame tree. Coming from an enormous dangling pod, which I left in Hawaii to reduce the risk of carrying pathogens, the seeds look like elongated beans. But unlike beans they come in a waterproof, waxy casing that prevents them from swelling even when soaked in pure water. It’s a strategy many plants and trees employ to encourage their seeds to last longer before they sprout, which gives them more of a chance to spread far and wide or emerge at the right times.
Many varieties of Lupine have a similar seed coating, which makes sense because they are also members of the Fabaceae or pea family, and this is something that can make their propagation more complicated. In the case of Lupine, the translucent seed coating is degraded by winter freeze-thaw cycles, fire, or long periods of time in general, helping the plant to get at least some of its seedlings to lie dormant in the seed bank and spring up in optimum conditions in early spring or after a wildfire clears competitors away. But Delonix regia, a tropical species, doesn’t live with cold winters or with recurrent fire (as far as I know). Instead, I wonder if the casing naturally dissolves in the stomach of an animal or bird, and sprouts great distances away in piles of poop.
In any case, I set seven seeds to soak in a tray of water and none of them looked any different after 24 hours. As a test I scoured the corners of two seeds with a piece of sandpaper, and sure enough, they began swelling from the scoured end, stretching and ripping the waxy coat apart until the entire seed had swelled.
I’m also unsure about the viability of the Terminalia catappa, or sea almond seeds, which were easy to find all over the beaches in Hawaii. Supposedly these too are fickle to grow from seed—many of the seeds cores rot out during the long time that passes between the moment they fall and when the right conditions come along to germinate. The interestingly almond-shaped, lightweight, corky seeds evolved to float in sea water and colonize distant beaches, but are hard to pry open and I was unable to cut any open with the tools I had on hand during my trip. I’m excited about the seeds because the attractive, large-leafed trees seem to be a potential substitution for fiddle leaf figs, which are extremely trendy houseplants, but, in my opinion, are not well suited to life indoors. Fiddle leaf figs are just too finnicky, languishing in the low-light conditions in most homes and developing unsightly spots or dropping leaves at the slightest provocation.
Clusia rosea is another candidate I hope to use to fill the role of the fiddle leaf fig, and I got a few tiny seeds along with some cuttings. The seeds are small and come imbedded in a sticky orange goo that helps them attach to mature trees in a wet forest, germinate on a branch, send aerial roots down to the ground and ultimately overwhelm or strangle the unfortunate host tree. The seeds dry out and die easily (I planted six and the rest were dry and dead within a day), but the cuttings seem resilient, staying very plump and green in transport.
Additionally, there are some dry Pandanus tectorius (screwpine) seeds in my cache, a rare Hawaiian native plant that happens to be extensively cultivated, and I was able to collect the dry seeds from the lawn at a resort.
I’m fortunate to be somewhere with a lot of light, and the plants are getting started in a humidity dome to help them root and also give me a chance to discard any that show signs of flies or disease. However, they’ve all been rinsed and soaked, plucked and preened, and have had any spotted or damaged leaves removed. I’m not expecting any problems, and can’t wait to see what some of them turn out like.
