The garden is full of Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum) seed pods these days.
And remember how I said that Wild Geranium spreads via exploding seed pods that hurl the seeds several feet (with a good wind) from the mother plant?
So when my friend Jo ana came to help in the garden last week she took this very cool video of Geranium pods expelling their seeds. You can actually see the extremely tiny seeds flying away. She slowed it down a bit to make it more fun to watch.
Wild Geranium is a fine woodland native, and now it’s clear how it gets around so quickly.
I love that video. It is so cool to see this. I planted a G. maculatum this summer. I can’t wait until I can try to see this action. It does have a few blooms but I don’t know when it will set seed. Maybe it will wait until next year. When ever it happens I hope to see it.
I’ve had this plant for 20 years and this is the first I’ve seen the exploding seeds.
That is just about the coolest thing ever. I am heading right over to my geraniums right now! Thanks for this!
Good luck!
Very cool! I have had G. maculatum in my garden for years, and never knew it did this.
Same here, until very recently.
Great video! I think your wild geraniums are prettier than our wild geraniums. Amelia
Though we call them Wild Geraniums as their common name, there are now a couple of cultivars bred from this species.
Never knew they did that but it explains why I have them growing all over my backyard !
That would do it!
Well, that’s fun to know! I hope mine will spread a bit!
I’d say your chances are good!
Protect those eyeballs! Although yours is a pretty and welcome spreader, this is reminding me of our shotweed or hairy bittercress, Cardamine hirsuta, Consistently shoots tiny seeds in my eyes, so I squint while weeding them!
Ah, thanks for the warning!
Love the video! Thanks for highlighting such a cool seed dispersal mechanism.
You’re welcome.
How wonderful to be able to capture that!
It was really my friend, she is much more adept with her phone than I.
That’s pretty amazing!
Yes!
What a neat video! Many gardeners talk about this one, but our natives, like Carolina geranium ( Geranium carolinianum) are quite different: tiny and self-effacing. If they do shoot their seeds about, I can’t imagine they’d go more than a couple of inches,since the flowers are only about a third of an inch across.
But then you have so many other outstanding native flowers.
Very cool video! Something that would be hard to see normally, but slowed down, shows the details.
Yes, slowing it down makes it work.
Oh my gosh – that is an amazing video! Great work and thanks for sharing it!
You’re welcome!
Amazing! Great video, and how lucky we are to be able to watch something like that these days. My Mum would have been thrilled!
I’ve come to feel that smart phones are a mixed blessing, but this is on the positive side of the ledger,
Yes, I agree re the smart phones. I am going to take photos of my spring bulbs flowering this year, better than writing in my garden diary.
So that’s how they do it. How clever. Great video.
Geraniums are smarter than they look.
Thank you for the video and the morning smile and chuckle. I have pink ones in numerous gardens and always found it amazing how they multiplied so quickly. Now, I know. 🙂
The shocking truth about Geraniums revealed!
What a great video – love it!
Glad to hear it!
Great video! So fun to see it.
Thanks!
Great post! Years ago, before my garden was as shady as it is now, I could grow a favorite wildflower, Drummond phlox (Phlox drummondii). They bloom in spring, set seed in June/July. I could hear the seeds explode into the world, as they spent blooms cast them out. It was a fun percussion in the garden.
Well, now I want some of that Drummond Phlox. Have to find out if it grows here, or if other Phlox species do the same. I have only P. paniculata and P. glaberrima.
Thank you for the link to the short video of the seeds erupting. That is very cool!
Glad you enjoyed it.
What fun! One of the many interesting ways seeds disperse. Thanks for sharing.
Plants are more inventive than we often realize.
I read this yesterday, then I was distracted and I don’t think I commented. I have a couple of these plants in my shade garden. I didn’t know this; enjoyed the video.
Glad you liked it.
That is so incredibly cool! I have grown hardy geraniums for decades (haven’t had a garden without them since the 1980s) but have never actually watched the seeds ‘launch’!
Me neither. It’s good to have talented friends.
Wonderful video! We have a weed that spreads its seed around like that! LOL!
Yes, if only plants we liked did this.
It’s fun isn’t it? Erodium Pelargoniflorun does this too and you can set off chain-reactions where a seed flung out of one pod hits another, that then bursts and those hit others and the whole thing cascades and suddenly you’re going to have a lot of self-seeded plants coming up shortly.
It seems more plants do this kind of thing than I realized.
What a fantastic video!!! Isn’t nature amazing? Aren’t we lucky to have technology that can capture that.xxx
Yes, indeed.
A garden is ever amazing — thanks to Jo ana for the show!
Yes, indeed.
Very cool video! Wild geraniums are one of my favorites.
Mine too!