44 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



however, is not a plant that has any method of flinging its 

 seed abroad. Unlike grass seed which is wind borne, the 

 round compact clover seed falls to earth where it is grown. 



Some few seeds are pedestrians on their own account; 

 but their progressive power may easily be exaggerated. 

 However, the curious awns of a wild oat do certainly enable 

 it under any stimulus to wriggle itself forward along the 

 ground almost like an animal. 



A trick of dispersal, that most country children have 

 noticed, is to be seen and heard, any hot autumn day, among 

 the whins. The pods 'go pop.' In shrivelling under the 

 sun into their blackness, lines of strong tension are developed 

 and the pods burst with a sharp spiral twist that shoots the 

 seeds a yard or two, as far as the more ingenious catapult 

 of the balsam or geranium. 



Of the seeds that are dispersed many millions are never 

 sown. Safe sowing is as necessary to preservation as wider 

 distribution. So in the struggle for life some have sur- 

 vived by perfecting a mechanism for covering the seed with 

 soil or pressing it into a congenial crevice. It is worth 

 growing a garden hepatica for the pleasure of watching the 

 insertion of the seed. The stem bends over till the seed 

 is against the earth and then begins a spiral movement 

 which properly corkscrews the seeds into the earth. This 

 sort of device has been developed by rock plants which 

 might waste a dangerous percentage of their seed by the 

 destructive force of gravity if they did not guard against it. 

 Many have noted how the dainty toad flax, with the ivy 

 leaf, feels for cracks and then presses the seed home with a 

 delicacy of touch and a sense for the right spot which a 

 surgeon might envy. 



The tricks of sowing and dispersal surpass enumeration 

 if the botany of the tropics is ransacked. The mangroves 



