Monday, February 28, 2011

Seeds of an Idea

        "I wonder what it could be?" I looked down in my red tin of seed packages and saw all kinds of packets and seeds .There at the bottom was a seed that was quite large and I couldn't remember it from last year. Well I set it in some potting soil, watered it and left it and maybe if it grows, the penny will drop, and I'll say "Oh yes, it was so and so..."

The best part of gardening to me is planting seeds. I am always just amazed that from these tiny little fragments can grow such wondrous things. Not only that, they all seem to know if they should grow into a dahlia or a daisy. They know if they like an abundance of water or sun and if they will be large or small .They know what kind of leaf they should grow, what color to be and  if they like bees or butterflies best .However the most amazing thing is  they produce new seeds that will look just like them. Within that little miniscule seed is all that information.

I read somewhere that every different kind of seed from all over the world is being collected into huge seed banks to be stored for future emergencies. Can you just imagine how big the building would have to be to store seeds from every kind of flower, tree, bush and growing thing? It's like an Ark for seeds.
 See Wikipedia for more info.
Banksia seed pod

Most plants make seeds in great abundance. Open a seed package and there are just too many to count. Look at the acorns underneath our oak trees in the garden and know nature is planning ahead to make sure at least some new oak trees will grow.

I suppose with humans and other living things our seed package would be in our genetic DNA and the miraculous thing is that is also packed into  tiny spaces and has a wealth of information. From a single particle of a hair, all kinds of things about me as an individual can be known. Not only that, information about my mother and father and what I might also pass on to my children and even their children is there for the reading if you know how to do it. I wonder one day if there will be a home machine where we can read our own DNA seed just like we look at our blood pressure readings. Now wouldn't that be interesting?
  
That sounds like the seed of an idea. But where do these abstract ideas come from? Is there a seed for ideas already planted in our DNA?. Maybe Great Grandma Millicent originated different ideas but didn't use them and so passed them on to me. So do we have ideas already buried deep within our DNA? Seeds passed on through generations of ancestors. Does that account for the prodigies of early age we hear about?

Or just maybe an idea is a new original seed that is just being evolved. How would it happen? An idea springs in your mind but comes from where ? Maybe it's an idea seed particle that you have read about or seen or heard or touched and it lodged in your brain. Maybe there are trillions of idea seed particles floating about in the universe all around us that we haven’t discovered yet.

Who knows, maybe there will be a machine to collect and read those floating idea seeds one day too. Now that would be truly amazing.