Germination Essay

Germination is the transition from mature embryos to an actual plant containing both a root and a shoot. This involves having a visible root and shoot as well as cotyledon elongation. (Attree 1990) Once the seed germinates, both a root and a shoot forms, and the seed capsule is pushed up, out of the dirt by the stem before it falls off. The different treatments used in this study affected the overall germination of the Picea mariana seeds. The seeds which were only treated with distilled water germinated as they were expected to germinate. The seeds that were treated with the Kalmia extract tended to have roots which were much shorter than the shoots. The same thing occurred with the seeds that were grown in the soil that Kalmia grew in, as well as the …show more content…
That is because Kalmia is an allelopathic plant and the germinates reacted to the chemical compounds that were present in the extract. The same thing occurred with the organic matter for the same reason, the Kalmia likely leached allelopathic compounds in the soil which the seeds reacted to. (Inderjit 2002)
The seeds which germinated in the solution with a pH of 3.5 reacted in much of the same way as the seeds influenced by the allelopathic compounds in both the Kalmia extract as well as the Kalmia soil. This is likely because the pH of the solution was too acidic for proper root growth. (Attree 1990)
All this data is shown in figure 1. The box plots for treatments 2, 3 and 4 all contain lower root: shoot ratios compared to the box plot for treatment 1. Treatment 1 was the distilled water, treatment 2 was the organic matter, treatment 3 was the Kalmia extract and treatment 4 was the pH solution. P-values were calculated to show the difference between the four treatments and these values are shown in table 1. According to these values, treatments 1 and 3 are the least similar, while treatments 3 and 4 are the most