One way in which plants spread their seeds, ready to grow a new plant at a distance from the parent is by exploding the seed pod. Watch the “touch-me-not” seed pods exploding here.
An illustrated talk by an academic, showing three different kinds of seed dispersal – wind, animal and fire.
Watch the seed pods of Himalayan Balsam explode and send seeds travelling at 95Km/hr for a distance of up to 6 metres.
When a seed starts to grow into a plant, it is called “germination”. This video shows how germination happens.
This is a very quickly spoken video on germination. The process, the pictures and the spoken word are accurate but the text captions in the video are hilariously wrong at times.
This is a time lapse video of lima bean seeds germinating. Sometimes germination can seem very slow but with time lapse, you can see 6 days of growth take place in a few minutes.