About a month ago, we drove down to the Warm River Spring and former fish hatchery site in Island Park. This is a favorite place for us, and I have been saddened to see noxious and obnoxious weeds such as spotted knapweed, hoary alyssum, yellow toadflax, plumeless and musk thistles, and common mullein, gaining ground each year in spite of efforts (mine and others) to control them. This trip, though, I noticed large patches of a perennial shrublike herbaceous plant (dies back to the ground each year) with yellow flowers. I had never noticed it there before, nor did I recognize it as a native. I did a little research and discovered that it is St. Johnswort, or St. John’s Wort, Hypericum perforatum, a native to Europe, Asia and Africa.

Whether it is the giant seed of the coco de mer or the dust-like seed of the jewel orchid or any size seed in between, each seed contains an embryo, a tiny plant with all the genetic material necessary to grow into its parent plant. That is relatively easy to envision with a 40-pound coco de mer seed, but much harder with the jewel orchid or similar plants, such as sagebrush, which may have two million seeds per pound. While the embryo doesn’t resemble the parent plant, it does have leaves called cotyledons, a stem, a plumule (embryonic shoot) which grows up between cotyledons and contains the primordial true leaves, and a root, called a radicle.