Early this year, ENHS board member Marge Zane brought in some strange objects to one of our board meetings. I was pretty sure they were seeds but didn't recognize them. I had a vague sense I'd seen them before. Marge found them in the driveway of her home southwest of Eugene out on Lorane Highway, on the west side of Spencer Butte.

First, we showed them around the Eugene Natural History Society board members, then to the society members at large at one of our program meetings. Nobody recognized them. I took a bag of the seeds to the Wildflower Festival at the Mount Pisgah Arboretum in May and put them out on the experts' table with a sign that said, "Mystery Seeds: can you recognize them?" But nobody recognized them. One person took some home picked them apart. He found them filled up with a larva so he guessed these objects were insect galls. He was not the only one who thought this. I sent seeds up to experts in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University. Nobody there recognized what the seeds were but one botanist opined they had to be insect galls. Another thought it would be, "forever a mystery."

Well, neither Marge nor I were willing to accept "forever a mystery." Chuck Kimmel split some open and found what looked like little plant embryos. I found the same, so that the seeds with larvae were undoubtedly being preyed upon by seed predators. If they were seeds, then they should grow if planted! I slapped my forehead when I thought of this. It turns out that several other ENHS board members already had this idea and had planted some of Marge's seeds. Mine were planted on May 10 and germinated by the first of June. The cotyledons were a pretty, glossy green. There were two cotyledons, so we knew it couldn't be some kind of monocot ("one cotyledon" group, like grasses and lilies).

While the cotyledons expanded and generated the life energy for the plants to grow, we tried to guess what they might be. Several thought they might be mistletoe seeds, but mistletoe seeds are not dry but sticky, so they can attach to branches when carried there by birds. There was a lot of periwinkle (Vinca) at Marge's place and this was a hot candidate for me, at least for a while. Periwinkle has very shiny leaves, just like the cotyledons of our seedlings. On a visit to Marge's, she showed us some seedlings growing right next to a big patch of periwinkle. However, the pictures of periwinkle seeds I found on the web (Google Image is wonderful!) didn't look much like our seeds. Periwinkle seeds were intricately fissured and ours looked looked like shriveled brains inside the papery coating.

Although the seeds germinated quickly enough, it took a long time for the seedlings to develop true leaves that could be identified with confidence. The critical evidence that my periwinkle theory was doomed came when it developed that the leaves occurred one a time on the stem, not in pairs like periwinkle. In the end, it turned out that these strange, silver and pink, papery seeds are from the dried berries of English ivy. Once I knew this, it wasn't hard to find pictures of ivy seeds on the web. Arrgh, we so wanted them to be something interesting. Melody, Nature Trails editor, had grown some of the seeds and immediately yanked them out. She said of them, "They grew, and they grew, and the glossy green brought pride and chatter, 'mine have sprouted!' Then, the many inquiring souls providing sustenance and nurture suddenly cried out and swiftly exhumed the sprouting interlopers from their tiny beds, never giving them the chance to spread and spread."

Color pictures of our odyssey are on my gallery web site:

http://web.mac.com/davidwagner/Site/mystery_seeds.html

I really had seen these seeds before, in my driveway here in north Eugene. Look for them, gather them, and throw them in the fireplace! This plant is a menace to native vegetation, the green horde that takes over wild places in our public parks. The Eugene Natural History Society started the tradition of pulling ivy in Alton Baker Park and maybe should get back into such activity. Portland has a very active anti-ivy group, too. We do work cleaning up our public space. This is a good place to mention our adopted bicycle path, the stretch along the north bank between Ferry Street Bridge and the Washington-Jefferson Bridge. We've scheduled a cleanup for March 9, at 10 a.m. We'll be reminding you as the season progresses. That is the day we start Daylight Saving Time, so watch out! 10 am DST is actually 9 am by personal biorhythm time. Ha!

David Wagner, ENHS President