I'm always impressed by the inventiveness of plants in their methods of dispersing seeds. Dandelion and thistle have gossamer-light parachutes that waft on the breeze. The poppy bears ornate, baroque-looking canisters that shake their seeds onto the surrounding soil. Cleavers and burdock attach themselves to furry coats. Blackberry, rowan and cotoneaster fruits are greedily consumed by hungry animals who excrete the seed hours later in a entirely different place, complete with fertiliser. The coconut floats across whole oceans in search of a shore on which to settle.
But seeds today are truly intelligent, for many of them have harnessed the most successful dispersal system ever: modern human beings - and gardeners in particular. Through catalogues, horticultural associations' seed-lists, the Internet and friendly swaps, seeds are now effortlessly distributing themselves across thousands of miles.
Pardon me if all this sounds a little farfetched and over-romantic. My excuse is that recently I've been helping the "seed master" to pack and post seeds to the members of a horticultural society, and I've got a bit carried away with the idea of all these seeds winging their way over air, land and sea.
Each year, in a bout of optimistic enthusiasm, I sow dozens of varieties of seed. I love the orderly trays and pots, meticulously labelled with date and quantity sown, the plant name and the seed's provenance. I also love the sight of crook-necked and clench-fisted seedlings thrusting through the soil, as container after container comes to life. After that, my ardour cools a little, in the face of hundreds of fragile plantlets, each urgently demanding to be transplanted into roomier quarters. I'm sure you know the feeling.
At this point, it is best to choose just a few strongly-growing individuals from each batch and fling the rest onto the compost heap. But I come from a frugal family that never, ever throws anything out, so I often pot up the entire lot, wait until they are hopelessly pot-bound - and then toss them out.
Half the fun of growing from seed, as any gardener knows, is dreaming your way through the seed lists and catalogues. This year I came across a range of tempting vegetables, from Simpson's Seeds in Surrey. The small father-mother-son business is only a few years old, and much of the seed is produced in the back gardens of family and friends. Among the tantalising tomatoes are the Del series - Chocodel (deep-green with brown shoulders and green flesh), Unidel (red, immune to greenback), Daffodel (canary-yellow), and others - bred from the popular cherry tom, Gardeners Delight.
A number of old-fashioned "heritage" tomatoes also caught my attention: Black Plum (an excellent sauce-maker), Plum Lemon (from St Petersburg: bright yellow, with a citrus flavour) and Reisentraube, known in Hungary (where it used for winemaking) as "the goat's tit" tomato, owing to the nipple-shaped base of the fruit.
Simpson's also specialises in peppers, both sweet and hot chilli kinds. Among the latter - which are ideal for sunny windowsills - Friar's Hat is a cultivar of the less common Capsicum baccatum; last year's plants, according to Matt Simpson, bore 100 fruits each.
Chillies are easy to grow from seed, and are a good choice for the beginner. So also are most annuals, including the justifiably popular (and widely available) sunflower, nasturtium, California poppy and English marigold. These fiery-flowered plants, along with some well-placed bronze fennel and red orache (which are both edible) will make a gorgeous "hot border". Plant them in rivers or intersecting, irregular blobs, rather than in straight ranks, for the best, unconstrained effect.
Another easy annual is the low-growing, yellow-and-white poached-egg plant (Limnanthes douglasii, available from Simpson's, Suttons, Thompson & Morgan). Once you have it, it will self-sow forever in sheets of flowery sunlight. It looks equally good in flower border or vegetable bed, or sneaking onto the gravel. It is adored by bees, and in combination with the dwarf echium, `Blue Bedder' (widely available), it makes a cottagey-looking, buzzing blanket of blossom.
But one of the most spectacular plants to grow from seed is the towering relative of the dwarf echium: Echium pininana, or the giant bugloss (available from Thompson & Morgan). After three of four years of growing an untidy mop of long, bristly leaves, it crowns it with a Gaudi-esque spire of thousands of bluey-mauve blossoms - each one a nectar-rich feeding station for bees. In a sunny, sheltered position it can reach 14 feet. After this magnificent effort, it dies. But not before leaving behind a few hundred seedlings - many of which, via a foolproof gardener-borne dispersal system, inevitably end up in plant sales.
Simpson's Seeds, 27 Meadowbrook, Old Oxted, Surrey RH8 6LT, England. Telephone and fax: 0044-1883715242.
Suttons Seeds are widely available, mail-order service from C. P. Hackett, 4 Capel Street, Dublin 1. Telephone: 018734911.
Thompson & Morgan seeds are widely available; catalogue from Mr Middleton, 58 Mary Street, Dublin 1. Telephone: 018731118.