Now, place on your palm a conker or a grain of wheat, an avocado pip. Clasp it. Always the hard physicality, but also the sense of potency, so definite as to be tangible. Seeds. The beginning of life for plants of all types, whether the humble wildflower that is herb Robert, fixed in the crack alongside an English garden path, the sky-scraping redwood trees of California or the floating lotus flower of Chinese lakes.

Seeds: they come in as many forms as there are grains of sand on a beach. The biggest seed belongs to the coco-de-mer palm of the Seychelles, weighing in at three stone. The seeds of foxglove are smaller than a grain of sand and so light in weight that 10,000 put on the kitchen scales would register only 0.035oz.

Seeds: their strange beauties, their outlandish oddities. The

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