Thus a germination cue is a change in the
environment that aligns that environment with the
germination requirements of the seed; dormancy
breaking is a change in the seed that determines what
those requirements are. How could anything so
simple be misunderstood, sometimes by people who
ought to know better? Especially when problems that
this misunderstanding causes can hinder restoration
and waste money. Frankly, we don’t know. Maybe
the seeds of doubt are sown by undergraduate
lectures, long overdue for revision, that still report
the eccentric ideas of Harper (1959), who clearly
couldn’t resist a Shakespearean sound-bite. Perhaps
others are confused by the complexity of the
molecular events that underlie both germination
and dormancy. Maybe some have trouble grasping
that temperature can both break dormancy and
stimulate germination, sometimes at the same time;
that dormancy is a continuous variable; and that
even non-dormant seeds can still require many cues
to persuade them to germinate.
As the great Daniel Coˆme once remarked, there are
only two questions in seed biology: ‘What is
germination?’ and ‘What is dormancy?’ It’s a pity
that, at a very basic level, some of us are still getting
the answer to at least one of those questions wrong.