At the right you see something amazing, despite the fact that what's pictured is a sprig of a very common weed I just snipped from the path leading to my door. This is a cluster of fruits and flowers of the plant called Wild Geranium, Geranium carolinianum. Sometimes this plant is also called the Carolina Storkbill because the the fruit consists of that long, dark object you see arising from the center of three old flowers (one young flower with its pink petals is at the lower right), which reminds some people a stork's long bill.

In this species, the base of each "bill" expands into five baglike things (the five carpels of the earlier ovary). When the fruit is ripe, the baglike things break away from one another and the bag's "handle," which runs up the "bill," violently recoils, making the "bag" snap upward. During this process, the "bag's" seed is tossed away from the plant. In other words, each flower has five built-in "catapults" that physically toss the seeds into new territory. In the picture, two flowers show one of their "catapults" just after it's snapped upward. In the middle flower, inside the calyx, you can see two " unsnapped bags" waiting for their turn to be catapulted.

All seed-dispersal mechanisms are not this amazing, but, all-in-all, figuring out how plants spread their seeds into new territory is a fascinating subject. Here are the main ways most, but not all, plants do it:

WIND is the main transporter of most fruits and seeds of wild plants invading our backyards. Here are some adaptations enabling fruits and seeds to travel on the wind:

• Wind-catching tufts of hairs grow on many fruits entering our backyards, the best-known example being the dandelion, with its fluffy-white "parachute." It's been shown that a breeze of only two mph can keep a dandelion achene (fruit) alight, so obviously a good spring storm can easily carry them for hundreds if not thousands of miles. Asters, goldenrods, milkweeds, clematis, and willows are other common plants producing fruits with tufts of hairs that latch onto the wind. The picture at the right is the fruiting head of a Purple  Thistle, Cirsium carolinianum, of the Composite Family. This is a common weed along many roadsides and in abandoned lots, with purple flowering heads appearing in the summer and the white fruiting heads shown here appearing  in the fall.

• "Wings" appear on fruits of a number of backyard trees, including maples, ashes, elms, birches, and pines. The winged fruits at the right are those of the Red Maple, Acer rubrum. While winged fruits don't float in the air the way dandelion achenes do, they certainly can spin to the ground a good distance from the parent. Kids often call maple fruits "helicopters" because of their spinning. Of course the taller the tree is, the farther its winged fruits can spin away. This means that any tree robust enough to grow very tall will send its genetic material into new territory faster than smaller trees -- a good example of how "survival of the fittest" works.

• Being very small is the simplest and most successful manner of being dispersed by wind. On dry fall days when stiff winds usher in a major weather front, mosses, lichens, algae, and fungi produce diffuse clouds of super-lightweight spores. Spores have been found in abundance two miles high in the upper atmosphere, and can travel for thousands of miles.

• Bladder-like fruits are those in which the fruits are enclosed in an inflated, papery structure which can be rolled over the ground or snow by wind. You may not see this kind of fruit in your backyard unless you grow Chinese-Lantern Plant or Tomatillos in your garden, or you have a weedy area nearby where Ground Cherries grow. You see a Ground Cherry fruit at the right. The orange-framed insert shows part of the papery husk (the inflated calyx) cut away to show the tomato-like fruit inside it. In fact, Ground Cherries are very closely related to tomatoes. Many Mexican dishes use tomatillos, the green fruit inside the husk.

• Tumbling is a wind-disseminating strategy you may not see unless you live near an open, weedy area. Here the seed-bearing part of the plant or the entire plant snaps off at the base and rolls with the wind, dropping seeds as it tumbles. The most famous example of this is the Tumbleweed, but Russian Thistles also do it. The flower-bearing part, or inflorescence, of a very common grass called Agrostis is shown at the right. When this grass's seeds are mature the inflorescence breaks from the plant and on windy days can be seen rolling across fields. If the wind is really stiff, the whole inflorescence lifts into the air and can be carried for miles!

• Catapulting is a special kind of wind-scattering seen in several common backyard garden plants such as irises, evening-primroses, poppies, and larkspurs. At the right an open iris capsule is shown. The capsule had been three-sided, and now the three capsule walls have split apart, each wall taking its red seeds with it. When the wind blows, the flat capsule walls will catch in the wind and the capsule will shake. This shaking will then throw the seeds about so vigorously that the threadlike "stems" holding the seeds onto the walls will snap and the seeds will catapult a fair distance onto the ground.

ANIMALS are the other main transporters of plant fruits and seeds into our backyards. Here are the main ways they accomplish that:

• Fruits are eaten by animals, which carry the seeds inside their bodies elsewhere, until they come out, either by regurgitation through the mouth, or by being dropped in the feces. This is often the case with berries and other fleshy fruits in which the hard seeds or stones are embedded in soft tissue, as with cherries. In eastern North America it's amazing how quickly Red-cedar invades abandoned fields because birds flying overhead bombard their seeds there. Birds often swallow fruits whole, the pulps are removed in their stomachs, and the naked seeds are disgorged from the mouth and fall to the ground. Of course only animals who swallow seeds whole are good "dispersal agents.". Grosbeaks are birds who crack the seeds' hard coverings and eat the embryo and storage material so that nothing alive gets planted. The legume at right has matured and opened up in such a way that its bright red seeds are placed very conspicuously out where they almost seem to say "Take me!" to any bird passing by. This fruit is from a Coral Bean, Erythrina herbacea, growing near my home, so this kind of spectacular attempt of plants to entice animals to carry their seeds into new territories is not at all uncommon in nature.

• Caching, pronounced "cashing," is seen among backyard squirrels who bury acorns and other nuts for winter use. When these caches are forgotten or the cacher dies, the buried seeds find themselves nicely planted, ready to sprout in the spring. Many rodent species besides squirrels cache smaller fruits, but their activities usually take place at night, so we don't notice them.

• Clinging is seen among fruits equipped with hairs or spines specially adapted for latching onto passing animals -- or backyard- naturalists' trouser legs. Tick-trefoils produce legume-type fruits covered with tiny, hooked hairs that adhere to fuzzy surfaces like Velcro. Fruits of Spanish Needles (pictured here) are mounted with needle-like spines that are themselves provided with barbs, usually backward-projecting. Take a walk in the fall around my place and it's hard to escape returning with a lot of Spanish Needles stuck to your socks and trousers. There are several species of Spanish Needles. The one pictured is Bidens bipinnata, a common weed in eastern North America. At the left is an immature cocklebur fruit about the size of a pea. It's Xanthium strumarium, a fairly common European weed in parts of North America. Notice the hooks on the spine tips. When these spines penetrate a rabbit's fur, a dog's long tail hairs or a naturalist's socks, it's pretty hard to get the fruit free. If a spine penetrates your skin and one of those tiny hooks curves around your flesh, pulling the spine out is no fun!

• The mistletoe strategy is effective because mistletoe fruits are gummy and sticky. This stickiness causes the fruits' tiny seeds to adhere to bird beaks. When the birds finish eating, they fly to a tree branch, wipe their bills on the branch's bark and, voila…, a mistletoe seed finds itself exactly where it needs to be, for now it can send its "roots" into the tree, and become a semi-parasite.

• Unspecialized fruits can also travel. Maybe you can remember walking across a muddy lawn, then when you were inside cleaning your shoes you noticed that crabgrass seeds were embedded in the mud. Such tiny seeds as well as spores travel on the muddy feet of other animals, too. It's been found that many kinds of fungal spores travel within the plumage of birds, including migrants, so feather-bound spores can hitch rides for thousands of miles. Even insects carry spores on their bodies, including spores of disease-causing organisms. Dutch elm disease, cucumber wilt, and many other diseases are transmitted this way.

• Humans transport vast numbers of wild fruits and seeds, both intentionally and unintentionally. The picture at the right shows some little brown "stick-tights" I found stuck on my socks after a walk in the fields. Each brown, triangular thing, about 4/16-inch across (10 mm) is a section of a fruit from a plant called Tick Trefoil (Desmodium paniculatum). Later when I sit cleaning my socks and thumping the things in the grass, I'll be sowing Tick Trefoil. All human plant-sowing is not so obvious. If you sow your lawn with bluegrass, there just might be a few weed seeds in it. If you hire a truck to carry in fill dirt to rid your lawn of a low spot, that fill dirt may bring some fascinating invaders. If you buy a Twinkie, the railroad car that carried the flour with which to make your Twinkie may have transported a few weed seeds on its runners, from one side of the country to another... Well, the avenues by which humans can spread seeds are practically endless.