Plants don’t waste time. Why wait until tomorrow if today will do… Once a plant’s done blooming, they’ll put energy into the fruits and seeds. Some of the spring bloomers are ripening the fruit on the stem, to make them attractive to birds, or they are ready to drop the seed to the garden floor so that ants can disperse them.
Red baneberry (Actaea rubra) stopped flowering a few weeks back and almost immediately the berries started appearing:
The ripening fruit of Actaea rubra
Wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) has produced these alien looking seed pods that are one to two inches in length:
wood poppy seed pods
And off go the seeds... June 24 2011
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