Product Description

The story of seeds, in a nutshell, is a tale of evolution. From the tiny sesame that we sprinkle on our bagels to the forty-five-pound double coconut borne by the coco-de-mer tree, seeds are a perpetual reminder of the complexity and diversity of life on earth. With "An Orchard Invisible", Jonathan Silvertown presents the oft-ignored seed with the natural history it deserves, one nearly as varied and surprising as the Earth's flora itself. Beginning with the evolution of the first seed plant from fernlike ancestors more than 360 million years ago, Silvertown carries his tale through epochs and around the globe. In a clear and engaging style, he delves into the science of seeds: How and why do some lie dormant for years on end? How did seeds evolve? The wide variety of uses that humans have developed for seeds of all sorts also receives a fascinating look, studded with examples, including foods, oils, perfumes, and pharmaceuticals. An able guide with an eye for the unusual, Silvertown is happy to take readers on unexpected - but always interesting - tangents, from Lyme disease to human color vision to the Salem witch trials. But he never lets us forget that the driving force behind the story of seeds - its theme, even - is evolution, with its irrepressible habit of stumbling upon new solutions to the challenges of life. 'I have great faith in a seed,' Thoreau wrote. 'Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.' Written with a scientist's knowledge and a gardener's delight, "An Orchard Invisible" offers those wonders in a package that will be irresistible to science buffs and green thumbs alike.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #138601 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
"Seeds - familiar, mysterious, wonderful, endlessly fascinating, but rarely considered carefully. In this beautifully written popular exposition, Jonathan Silvertown brings seeds to life, illuminating their diversity, their amazing properties, their role in nature, evolution and fate over time, germination and fate in the life of an individual. To be read by all those interested in nature: they will gain deeper understanding from the lively words that trace these and many other aspects of these familiar structures." - Peter H. Raven, director, Missouri Botanical Garden"

About the Author
Jonathan Silvertown is professor of ecology at the Open University, the author of Demons in Eden, and the editor of 99 per cent Ape: How Evolution Adds Up.

Customer Reviews

A gem, a delight and a storehouse of delicious information
I'm always on the lookout for books about food plants in their natural state detailing where those foods originated, and how those plants become domesticated and changed over time. "An Orchard Invisible" (the title is from the Welsh proverb "a seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible") is just such a book and one of the best I have ever read.

Just to give you an idea of how densely packed this beautifully written book is with fascinating information about seeds--and by extension food and human culture--consider these gems from just two pages:

"MSG occurs naturally in fermented soybean paste, which is the source of miso and soy sauce used to flavor Chinese and Japanese dishes." (p. 170)

"Flavor sensations are a complicated confection created in the brain from the combined inputs of all five senses." (And not just five tastes on the tongue and the myriad aromas that the nose detects.) (p. 170)

There is a berry from the West African tree Synsepalum dulcificum that contains "a protein that interferes with taste receptors in the tongue and causes sour foods to taste sweet." Unfortunately efforts to take commercial advantage of this berry failed because only fresh berries will do the trick. (p. 171)

"...[W]hite chocolate...has the sugar and cocoa butter but not the pharmacological compounds found in normal chocolate..." On the other hand, cocoa powder contains "all the pharmacological constituents and sugar found in a bar of chocolate, but without the cocoa butter." Using this information you can test yourself to find out if you love chocolate for the "mouth feel" of the velvety cocoa butter (absent in a cup of cocoa) or because of the buzz you get from theobromine (absent in white chocolate). (p. 171)

Here's more: sunflower seeds and many other plant seeds grown in northern latitudes contain less saturated oils than the same plants grown farther south. Why? "The answer seems to be that at lower temperatures, seeds whose oil stores are held in saturated form have difficulty germinating...probably because...at low temperatures saturated oils are not liquid enough for germinating seeds to use them. Unsaturated oils...are apparently easier to metabolize at lower temperatures, as you might expect from their lower melting points." (p. 144)

How about this: "in the mid-1970s it was found that orthodox Hindus who had been quite healthy on a vegan diet in their native India began to suffer from a high incidence of metaloblastic anemia after living for some time in England consuming the same diet. The cause was traced to vitamin B-12 deficiency, which in India was prevented by insect contamination of grains." (pp. 168-169) Let me add an exclamation mark to that gastronomic irony!

And this: Plants use a light-sensing molecule called phytochrome that can differentiate between light that has passed through leaves and light that has not, so that they can "sense where their neighbors are and to adjust their own growth so as to avoid them. Many seeds also use phytochrome in the same way and will germinate in darkness, but not if exposed to light that has passed through a leaf." (p. 123)

Masting, which is the name for the trick nut-bearing trees use to control the animals that eat their seeds, is a diabolic scheme whereby the tree produces a bumper crop one year filling everybody's tummy, and then for the next x number of years produces not much at all, starving the little critters to death. In this way during the bumper crop years the extra nuts get buried and forgotten or the burier dies, and in the lean years the nuts germinate sans foragers. (See Chapter 8 "Ten Thousand Acorns.")

"More than three thousand species [of plants]...have a fatty wart called an elaiosome attached to them that attracts ants in search of food. Patrolling ants that find such seeds do not detach the elaiosome there and then, but carry the whole seed back to their nest, where it is buried. Once the seed has been stripped of its elaiosome in the ant nest, the ants dump it in a viable state on a trash pile where it can germinate." (p. 112)

Some tidbits:

Coffee is originally from Ethiopia; sunflowers were first cultivated in North America; ricin is found in castor beans (hopefully not in castor oil!) and "is more toxic than cobra venom and has no known antidote (p. 126); some seeds are shaped so that with the help of a little wind are able to screw themselves into the ground all the better to germinate (see Chapter 11: "Circumstance Unknown"); the double coconut of the coco de mer of the Seychelles can weigh 50 pounds; the oldest seed ever to germinate is a two-thousand year old date seed (p. 113).

Silvertown, who is professor of ecology at the Open University in England, sprinkles the text with snippets from history and lines of poetry from Burns, Dickinson and others pertaining to seeds and things relating to seeds. The text is further augmented with some delicate and precise black, white and grey illustrations by Amy Whitesides, making the book a little gem, a delight and a storehouse of delicious information.