stone said:
Ok, sounds like you stored the seeds....
My method is to plant immediately.
Dry storage does things to seeds. Not surprised that they lost some viability.
How do you plant columbines and echinacea?
I plant them immediately as well....
Yes, they were stored. They are harvested too late to start immediately in this climate. But the longer stored ones were the ones I started in spring with no pre-treatment and which had 90+% germination within a week or two. The ones that benefited from stratification were not stored for as long because they were started in fall. There was no loss of viability, the germination % wasn't different but the non-stratified ones in fall took longer to germinate than the stratified ones.
I have also experimented with straight from the pod - same thing, seed dormancy. With other plant seeds dormancy can wear off in dry storage, so that's a possibility. But it may just be a mechanism determined by the climate or time of year of seed maturity or something like that.
I haven't tried columbines or echinacea. I would just let them self-seed. On a related note, though, I've tested a species daylily seeds for seed dormancy and about 25% would germinate immediately while the rest had seed dormancy. In some formal research decades ago in Illinois it was found that about 55% of the daylily seeds in their tests had seed dormancy. Some more recent research in Japan also found seed dormancy in two species daylilies that grow wild there.
Anyone who has been breeding daylilies for a while and who doesn't stratify may, as I suggested above, be selecting against seed dormancy if they don't wait for the later germinating ones. Say you have seed dormancy in 40% of your daylily seeds but you only keep the 60% that germinate quickly, then over time you are possibly selecting against seed dormancy. It may also be that seed dormancy is more likely in seeds matured in colder climates.
