Botanic Garden Student Educator Showcases the Beauty and Function of Seed Pods

The botanic garden is always working with seeds, from cleaning and cataloging hundreds of thousands of seeds to include in the Index Seminum to extracting the seeds from Lyman’s cocoa pods to experiment with making chocolate—and everything in between. Seeds get a lot of credit in the growing of plants, but have you ever wondered about the pods that originally contained many of these seeds, and why they take on such a variety of forms? This was a question that came up for Ella Sommerfeld ’27 while she was looking through Conservatory Curator Jimmy Grogan’s seed collection in preparation for her project as a Botanic Garden Student Educator (BoGSE). 

Grogan’s collection came from southeast and west Amazonia, Brazil, where he studied the life histories of high-value timber species and working in forest management. During his time abroad, Grogan collected seeds and seed pods from the ground as he encountered them, choosing them for their beautiful forms and the stories they would remind him of later.

“One thing I noticed was that a lot of the seeds weren’t necessarily super striking or that visually interesting,” Sommerfeld said. “The most visually interesting thing was the seed pods and the bean pods and the fruits that he had collected that still had the seeds inside of them.”

After looking through Grogan’s collection, Sommerfeld decided to center her project around seed dispersal, exploring the multitude of ways that seeds are transported from one place to another through the design of their pod. Dispersal techniques on display include wind, animal, and ballistic dispersal. Animal dispersal means animals contribute to moving the seed either through consumption, such as with  Bertholletia excelsa (Brazil nut), or by catching a ride on an animal’s fur, like Apeiba tibourbou. Ballistic dispersal, characteristic of Metrodorea flavida, means the pod bursts open and propels the seeds 10-20 feet away. 

As a part of the project, Sommerfeld wanted to create an exhibit displaying some of the most interesting seed pods from Grogan’s collection. However, arranging the pods proved more difficult than she had anticipated: “I looked into many different stands or things to elevate them, but because they were such weird shapes, there wasn’t anything built to display the seeds in the way I wanted them to,” she said.

Eventually, following the suggestion of her dad on a phone call, Sommerfeld settled on developing her own display mechanisms using a laser cutting technique to make acrylic shapes. She employed the help of student workers at the Design Thinking Initiative (DTI) to learn the process and work through ideas. 

“I went through different prototypes to try to display the seeds in the way I wanted, and eventually it got to a point where it was how I wanted it to look visually,” Sommerfeld said. “Then it was just creating the research and placards that displayed the information, and putting it all together.”

And then there was one slight hiccup. Just as Sommerfeld was putting the final touch on the display for Seed Scatter at the end of the 2024 fall semester, and was placing the heavy plexiglass enclosing back on top of the display, gravity worked against her and awkward weight of the enclosure brought the whole piece crashing down. Luckily SCMA was able to loan Sommerfeld a replacement and the exhibit is now on display in the Church Gallery at Lyman Plant House. This educational exhibit will run throughout the spring semester.

“I hope [visitors] learn something new and learn how diverse seeds can be,” Sommerfeld said. “That’s what I discovered through the process of it—that seeds can look like all these different things, and that the plant holds onto them in all these different ways, and even the way they get to their new home can be in a multitude of ways as well.”