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Hi Lesley,Very interesting. So this process has never been put out there until now? Probably worth a properly set up experiment with some conrols. Bit hard to get my head around the stratification problem and the warm, cold, warm/day length requirements that many plant groups have evolved to respond to. But hey its always great to hear good news on the seed raising front.Cheers, Marcus
Lesley interesting to hear of the cup of tea method...something I will try. I want to give it a go on dactyl orchids, I can get few to germinate but not high numbers.. Trilliums I have been sowing for years..any tips like this I will give it a go. Like Marcus said the stratification issue.. maybe speeded up?Thanks for passing that infoCheers
That's very interesting Tim, your comments about tea foliage and the giberellins. The whole subject of giberellic acid has left me totally in the dark and is a place I'm never likely to go, though if I were 30 or more years younger, who knows. I hope you or someone can take this tea thing a bit further because it does seem to me to have some potential for exciting possibilities.So far as I know Marcus, Jack Scott never mentioned such a thing to anyone except that apparently from the age of 5 he always encouraged Laurol in her gardening interests (Laurol at 5 I mean, not Jack. He always seemed to be about 70!) We in the Iris Group have for several years watched with envy the great success Laurol had with her Iris seeds but the method wasn't talked about much until we received so much American seed last year for the upcoming Convention and Laurol, anxious to encourage as many members as possible to try the seed, did a workshop on the subject at a meeting. She has been very happy to share the method so it's certainly no great secret now. Jack himself always did tend to keep things to himself, such as this method and word of any plant source he may have had.Stephen, I don't know what would happen with seed the size of orchid seed which is just dust to all intents and purposes. It would require some different way to manage the soaking process I think. All the seeds I'm trying are relatively large; iris, trillium, crocus etc and hard. I'm not bothering with frits or lilium because they germinate so well anyway within a reasonable time frame, and it hasn't occurred to me to try it with say epigaea, ramonda or primulas all of which I've sown in the last few days, but just sowing direct onto clean grit as I normally would. If you could mange it, the results will be interesting. Maybe the soaking time would need to be adjusted down? I've never sown Dactylorhiza seed but do have them come up in quantity among pots, in paths or grass or anywhere really, naturalizing in effect which is very nice. Admittedly this has only been with the spotted D. maculata or its ssp fuchsii, not elata or foliosa though I get the occasional self sown seedling of the latter. I had a nice stand of spotties outside our gate, on the roadside for 3 or 4 years until the council men came along and sprayed them! Never another showed its face.
Lesley - gibberellins are involved in many different aspects of growth, much in the way animal hormones are. Their best known role is in stimulating elongation of the internodes of plants (viz: tall and dwarf peas), but they are also classically involved in seed germination, seen in barley by the stimulation of enzymes which break down starch into sugars as the embryo starts to grow and the seedling develops (i.e: malting). They work at incredibly low concentrations which is why using pure isolated or chemically manufactured GAs can be tricky, so the technique you describe is probably just as effective (if this is indeed what is happening in detail). Science is an unusual activity in that it shares information and works by collaboration, even if there is plenty of rivalry too and it builds on little nuggets of information like this.
Years ago I used to do a lot of tissue culture for work and these hormones were part and parcel of media preparation. In some protocols we used to use a culture or nurse cells, which were undifferentiated (callus) of Nicotiana tabacum in suspension. These cells were spead on the surface of the agar media to hormonally support the formation of shoots.I was wondering, if GA is present in tea in sufficient quantities to initiate germination then surely green tea, which is un-fermented should have more...? It would be really interesting to set up a controlled experiment to look into the effectiveness of tea. Perhaps seed of three recalcitrant species, each sample split into three treatment groups, black tea, green tea and water control, something like 20 seed in each group and then a replication of the whole experiment at a later date. Records kept of germination time post treatment should show up any useful effect, but of course would tell you nothing about the actual mechanism. Does anyone have time to do this? Not me...!
Jupiter, are you volunteering for this experiment and the paper work? I think it should happen but my own record keeping is just too casual for me to do it usefully. Besides, I'm too old!
What is Aquadest? (See Hans J's post)
