“Seeing Seeds: A Journey Into The World Of Seedheads, Pods, And Fruit”

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• Every Plant Seed Has A Unique Story, Author Says

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  There are things one comes across every day and yet so often fail to notice the beauty. To help recognize what’s right in front of them, a new photography book on plant seeds was released to share their stories and stunning variations.

  “The amazing thing is it’s all hiding in plain sight. These are not hard things to find. You see them, but you don’t really look at them,” said Robert Llewellyn, who is a plant and landscape photographer, and one of the creators of the book.

  Through its close up images and short essays, Llewellyn and author Teri Chace highlight more than 100 seeds, fruits and pods in their book, “Seeing Seeds: A Journey into the World of Seedheads, Pods, and Fruit.”

  “What we tried to do is help people see seeds in a new way — tell them things they might not have known, tell them things they might have not realized if they knew about seeds, but to make it kind of an adventure,” Chace said.

  The book features stunning close-ups of seeds that use a technique called image stacking, which brings great focus to the images.

  “I tried photographing them outdoors and sort of too much competition visually and so I ended up with them on a light table and sort of photographed them like some of the old botanical paintings — very high details, white background so you can see it very clearly,” Llewelyn said.

  Besides just seeing seeds in a different way, the stories that are paired with the photos give small glimpses into the lives of seeds.

  “Each one has its own unique mechanisms — its own stories — really their goal is to self-replicate but the way they do it, the way, they protect themselves and the way they disperse themselves varies a great deal,” Chace said.

  One fun story she shared was of acorns — the nut of an oak tree. Although the acorn varies from species to species, they all share the same features. There’s the cap on one end and the nipple on the other end, which is a remnant of the flower style.

  The material inside is supposed to nourish the embryo, where the seed lies — inside the acorn. Around fall, squirrels are busy burying acorns saving them for later meals. What’s interesting is that the seeds never sprout. Why not?

  “It turns out that squirrels have figured out there’s an embryo in there which will spoil their meal so they bite off the end — that’s sort of the nipple end where the embryo is and then they bury the seeds, bury the acorn and then they don’t germinate,” Chace said.

  To take it a step further, the oak trees themselves have adapted and over centuries have produced acorns that embed the embryo deeper within the acorn, making it harder for squirrels to reach.

  “So this is an ongoing thing that we don’t really know about or see going on between the squirrels and the oak trees,” Chace said.

  She wasn’t the only one to learn the stories of seeds through the making of the book, Llewellyn also learned a great deal through his photography.

  “One of my favorite stories is the castor bean. I had a seed pod in my studio and I heard this loud pop one day and it shot the seed 30 feet across the studio,” he said.

  Apparently, the end of the seed is a little piece of fat that ants gravitate to. They take the seed to their burrow to feed the fat to their larvae. Once the oil is gone, they dispose of the seed in the refuse pile, essentially planting the caster bean seeds and dispersing the seeds for germination, Llewelyn said.

  “I like to tell people when they see this book for the first time, every seed has a story,” Chace said.

  To read more about the lives of seeds, their book is available here.