The Journey of a Sea Bean: In Praise of the Ocean’s Smallest Gifts
A sea bean can travel far and remain unscathed because the seed coat, the testa, is hard and impermeable yet light and buoyant. The dormant embryo that it contains is so well protected by this testa that viable sea beans can arrive on northern shores after floating on the surface of the ocean for thousands of miles. A sea bean that rattles is unlikely to grow, but as E. Charles Nelson warns in his book, Sea Beans and Nickar Nuts,
The only way to test whether a drift-seed is viable—capable of germinating—is to sacrifice the specimen and attempt to germinate it. It is a decision that you must make yourself, remembering that once the seed is prepared and planted it will produce either a rather a vigorous plant, probably requiring a massive, continually heated greenhouse in which to live, or nothing and then it will be so rotten that you will want to dispose of its putrid remains. Whatever the outcome, your lucky drift-seed will be lost for ever.
Perhaps the sea bean that I will one day find is still growing. Maybe it sits cradled, with others, within a seed pod that stretches a little over a meter in length and which dangles from a forest canopy. I have begun to imagine its journey, to think of the rainforest in which its vine grows. At some point the seed will slip from the pod. I do not know how the seeds are scattered—if the pod first falls and then breaks, or if it splits while still aloft. It does not matter; the seed is light and easily lifted from the forest floor by the rivulets of rain that snake through the leaf litter after a torrential downpour. Or maybe the pod hangs over a stream and the seed will not need to wait for the rainy season to begin its journey.
