A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
serotiny
Serotiny is the holding of seed on the parent plant, sealed in a cone or a woody fruit, long after it has ripened, and releasing it only when a trigger arrives. The commonest trigger is fire, which melts a resin seal or dries the structure until it splits, dropping seed onto ground that has just been cleared and fertilized with ash. Lodgepole and jack pine, banksias, and several proteas are serotinous.
Etymology
The word is built on the Latin for late, the same root as the botanical term for a late-flowering plant, and it names the delay rather than the mechanism. The fire-triggered subtype is pyriscence and the two are often used as though they were the same, though serotiny also covers seed released by drying, by the death of the parent, or simply by time.
Notes
The cone of a serotinous pine can hold viable seed for decades while remaining sealed on a living branch, so a stand carries its own replacement in the canopy indefinitely and can restock an entire burn in one flush. Banksia, fynbos, and pyriscence entries cover the same arrangement from other directions.