Frozen pots of withered stems, remnants of the past season’s adventures in growing plants from seeds, remain scattered about Marjorie’s garden waiting to be dumped on the compost pile. Every year at this time, I vow to cut back, to grow fewer pots of flowers and vegetables next year. It is an immense task from start to finish, yet toward the end of the coming long winter, influenced by seed catalogs and a passion that will not subside, I will not be held to this pledge. Over the winter I will no doubt purchase a new pot or two, add rather than subtract.

It is a fascination with seeds that drives this craziness. During the last week of August as I planned for the upcoming season of teaching, I searched forest and meadow for seeds to show my students, looking for every possible example of diversity in size and form. During one of our morning exercise walks through oak woods, Marjorie promised to leave me if I stopped one more time to pick up acorns.

On the radiator in my classroom an avocado seed has been floating for 10 weeks, suspended in a beaker of water by toothpicks, its pointed end submerged. The kids in Sex in Plants forgot about it after the first day. I keep the water level high, changing the water every Monday morning, filling the beaker when the water level gets low.

Two weeks ago the rock hard seed showed signs of swelling. A tiny crack opened at its base while the dark brown seed coat began to separate along a fissure that circumvented the sphere, revealing a creamy white core of endosperm, the nutrient source for the developing embryo. The kids were unimpressed.

Now, in the last week of this trimester course, when you look into the widening fissure, you can see a single taproot that grows longer every day as the rest of the embryo swells, splitting the seed wider and wider. I am fascinated; the students are worried about finals.

For me, seeds always will be miracles of creation. While similarities exist between plants and animals in the process of fertilization that leads to embryo development, the seed is a unique feature of flowering plants. The mature plant embryo, surrounded by nutrients for future growth, can lie dormant for months, even years, before resuming growth toward a reproductively mature adult.

In 2005, Israeli scientists germinated a 2,000-year-old date palm seed found during archaeological excavations at Masada, the desert mountain fortress where ancient Jewish rebels chose suicide over capture by Roman legions in 73 A.D. Until the discovery of this seed, the species it represents was considered extinct. The resulting sapling, nicknamed Methuselah, is now about 12 inches tall, a source of hope to scientists looking for a new source of medicinal drugs from a plant species used in ancient times to treat infections and tumors.

The resurrection of a species and the hope it represents, all contained within a seed discarded from the last meal of a Jewish rebel facing death 2000 years ago. My avocado seed, coming to life in the warmth of a classroom, is no less miraculous.

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