GROWING CONIFERS FROM SEED

Image Gallery  LEFT: ""Winged"" seeds take flight from a pinecone. RIGHT: A young conifer forest. PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR AND MOTHER'S STAFF

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We've all heard the old saw, "Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow." Well, the sighing, whispering conifer forests that still cover much of North America sprang from humble beginnings, too. In fact, these beautiful and useful trees have a hard time even getting started on their own.

However, that doesn't mean that evergreens are necessarily difficult to grow. With a little patience and a dollop of knowledge, there's no reason that you can't have the pleasure and satisfaction of raising your own trees from seed.

The trick to growing conifers (a group including pine, spruce, fir, and other narrow-leaved evergreens) lies in understanding how to work in harmony with nature . . . first to sprout the seeds and then to protect the delicate young plants from disease. As you likely know, conifer seeds (some of which are as large as a quarter-inch in diameter, while others are minute) are tucked between the scales of cones. The best time to gather the life-carrying nodules is in the fall, when the fibrous "petals" at the base of the woody husks have begun to open, indicating ripeness. Simply pick or clip off some cones and place them in a dish. As they dry, the seeds should loosen and drop out ... though occasionally a stubborn piece of "fruit" will have to be dismantled in order to get at the nuggets within.

At this point, your chances of success will be much improved if you take the time to understand how Mother Nature goes about reproducing conifers. The seeds of evergreens don't sprout as readily as do, say, gardenvariety marigolds. Nature, you see, must protect her future forests from such catastrophes as fire, drought, and disease . . . and does so by means of stratagems to prevent an entire crop of seeds from coming up (and thus being vulnerable) all at one time. Instead, some of the cone-borne kernels begin to grow immediately, while others may lie dormant for a very long time.

Therefore, if you were to simply stick wild conifer seeds in the ground, it might be years before any of them began to grow! Some wouldn't sprout until bacteria and fungi had eaten away at their coatings. Others would burgeon only following exposure to fire . . . after repeated freezing or thawing . . . or in response to some other natural sequence of events. The key to success, then, is to speed germination in some way that replicates nature's own processes.

Among the easiest of these to achieve is exposure — for periods of time that can vary from one species to another — to cold temperatures. This treatment, called "stratification", serves to break the dormancy of the embryos. (Since this article's space is limited, I'm going to ignore the evergreens that require more exotic handling . . . such as juniper, for instance, which sprouts best after being soaked in sulfuric acid!)

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