Friday’s Seeds: Rosaceae on the wind

“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today” – with this being said (I don’t remember by whom), the Friday’s seeds series starts again. Rosa family is extremely large and diverse, with many ornamental species. Equally diverse are the fruits and seeds.

Apart from the well-known species with fleshy fruits many are familiar with, many others have dry fruits, of which some are adapted for wind dispersal. For this purpose, the styles remain attached to the fruit and begin to elongate after pollination; they also develop hairs in various amounts and many times the fluffy ‘seed-heads’ are nice additional ornamental features. The featured image shows the alpine Geum reptans with developing fruit-heads.

What we usually ‘seed’ is actually the fruit, which is an achene; inside it holds one seed. Few examples:
This year good fortune made it that we can compare two mountain avens species: Dryas octopetala and Dryas oxyodonta seeds.

Also, we can have a look at the Aleutian avens, Sierversia pentapetala seeds (syn. Dryas pentapetala).

Sieversia pentapetala seeds (syn. Dryas pentapetala)

The genus Geum contains a lot of species cultivated in the gardens. It would be hard to distinguish them after the ‘seeds’ but we can at least define the genus.
Geum triflorum (Prairie smoke) and Geum rivale (Nodding avens) shown.

And, finally, something like a Geum on steroids if someone cares to google for plant pictures: Woronovia speciosa.

Woronovia speciosa