Seed ecology, dormancy, and germination: a modern synthesis from Baskin and Baskin

The names Baskin and Baskin will be as familiar to readers interested in the ecology of seed germination as ‘‘radicle’’ and ‘‘plumule.’’ It is Jerry Baskin who has the role of plumule in this scientific partnership, being the more visible (first named) author on the majority of the some 250 publications the Baskins have produced in the last three decades, but radicles become taproots and it is Carol Baskin who is senior author of this book with its massive accumulation of knowledge about seed germination that runs to more than 600 pages. It is interesting to learn that these partners were introduced to each other as well as to what has become the subject of their lifetimes’ work at the same moment in 1966 when chance determined they were to share a student project on the germination of Sporobolus vaginiflorus and Aristida longespica. Seeds can exhibit notoriously idiosyncratic germination behavior, sometimes varying as much among the progeny of a single maternal parent as they do among different species. This has made for a voluminous literature composed mainly of minutiae and, at least until relatively recently, lacking in synthesis. When I first became interested in this subject myself in the mid-1970s its ‘‘bible’’ was in fact not a work of synthesis but The Bibliography of Seedsby Lela V. Barton, to whom (along with Marianna G. Nikolaeva) the book under review is dedicated. I well remember the feeling of excitement when I finally obtained my own copy ofThe Bibliography of Seeds in a used bookstore in New York for $5. I only later discovered how difficult it was to extract any generalizations from the volume and why anyone had been prepared to part with it so cheaply. My copy has long sat on a top shelf, out of easy reach, in my office. Have Baskin and Baskin unscrambled the literature of seed germination sufficiently for their book to escape the same fate as Barton, quite apart from the fact that it is unwise to place any hardback book weighing 1.8 kilos on a top shelf? If it is to be successful, unscrambling requires at least three operations: first, methodological issues must be addressed, suspect findings must be eliminated and a core of reliable observations must be assembled; second a classification of seed dormancy traits needs to be devised and used to catalog the data; third, an ecological and evolutionary synthesis is needed. METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES