pictures of seedlings (or other stages of growth) in PF

I don't think I've come across many pictures in Plantfiles of seedling stage. I think it would be helpful to have pictures other than lush beautiful mature specimens. All due respect to members, and enjoying their many beautiful photos, but I, and others, might get more use out of a seedling picture than yet another flower. Maybe the Garden is naturally getting to the stage where other users will feel this way and make submissions accordingly. This is not a request for any action, but more of a suggestion to membership, for what it's worth. Then again, those mystery seedlings could be good for the ID forum, which I enjoy.

Definitely! There's a thread about a pack of Morning Glory seeds from 1948 someone found, and the package had a drawing of the seedling so you'd know it wasn't a weed. I thought that was pretty clever.
Sallyg, you should remind everyone of this in winter sowing in a couple months!
I put in some pictures of bulbs, because they can be pretty mysterious when you dig them up, especially when they come with a new house with a garden.

I have been trying to document complete life cycles in everything I work with in PF...but being a veggie grower and wild plant/tree 'person', you don't see much of those submissions unless you are specifically looking....click on my name and look at my images.....it that what you had in mind? It's a slow process...and takes a year to do one entry from plant to seed, but hopefully, I'll have many more by this time next year.

claypa-thanks for the 'second' and bulbs are certainly along the lines of what I'm thinking, and similar to what melody is doing with the life cycle.
melody--thanks for your message. I did look at (some of) your pics. a lot of familiar faces there, as I'm learning about natives here, in roughly the same zone. I think it's great that you're working on such a complete visual essay(?) on so many plants. Adds more dimension to the learning about the plants. May help confirm IDs, like my common ragweed.

I was thinking about doing the same thing, but wasn't sure how it would be received. I would really like to know what seeds of a certain plant looks like and what the seed pods look like when they are ready to be harvested. I was going to start posting pictures of seeds but didn't know if others would be interested so I haven't yet. I think showing the entire life cycle is a great idea!

I think there's somewhere in PF where it encourages people to submit photos of things other than the flowers and the full grown plant--pics of other parts of the plant and other life stages are very useful info for people and definitely should be submitted if you have them! I think a lot of people don't grow things from seed though and that's why most of what shows up in PF are pics of full grown plants. But by all means if you have pics of other growth stages those would be welcome additions!

Yes we're all for encouraging people to post pictures of all stages of growth and plant parts! We usually do some chivving up for this at times when people are likely to be propagating, seed collecting etc so it's great that other people want to spread the word too :)

As I write this I realise I have a number of seed photos to add myself :)

Edited to add:

While seed leaf (cotyledon) images are useful, the best stage for identification of most young plants is actually the 4 to 8 leaf stage.

This message was edited Jan 6, 2007 6:35 PM

Thanks Baa, I was wondering about that!

Well then I can add a fair number of seedling and seed pod pics. Esp. for bulb species. I'll start doing that as time permits. Is it OK if they are in pots?
Debbie

Dmj1218, That's great, most of mine are in pots and quite a few others are too :-D