Plant fruits and seeds are many things to many habits and organisms.

Seeds inside fruits are a hope flowering plants will reproduce.

Conifers do the same with seed cones.

Fruits and seeds are often the most nutritious parts of a plant, the part we eat, deer eat, birds eat, and the way we plant plants to get more fruit and seeds. Farmers sow seeds and then harvest seeds or fruits.

Each seed has an embryo inside each seed.

Plants, through seeds, can be relocated, shipped, and stored for centuries. We know seed banks, buried seeds in soil may not germinate until brought up closer to the surface where light strikes them.

Many many plants are growing fruits and seeds for us to eat, collect, store, save, freeze and sometimes just marvel and use as measuring or comparison structures when describing other items.

I recently saw a female ruby-throated hummingbird nest on a down-slopping maple limb. The homeowner, who has had nests in this urban tree four of the last five years, advised me look for a structure, hidden using lichens pasted on the surface by a female bird. The nest is sitting saddle-like on the small limb. “Look for something the size of a walnut,” he said.

Human anatomy texts used by medical students often make reference to a chestnut seed. “The prostate is the size and shape of a chestnut,” reads the 5th edition of Concepts of Human Anatomy and Physiology.

There is usually enough stored food inside a seed to get the embryo growing until the seedling can begin making food by photosynthesis.

All flowering plants produce their seeds inside a fruit. When mature, the fruits become either dry, as in corn, or remain fleshy as in apples. Either way there is grain for cows and juicy apples for deer.

Some fruits and/or seeds act as plant dispersal packages. An example list includes walnuts and hickory nuts where a single seed is embedded in the fruit. Acorns are exposed but capped.

Chestnuts drop from a spiny bur. Apples give use tasty flesh encouraging us to chuck the core-containing seeds. Wild plums give us a pit. Hickory teases us twice, first with a husk, then with a harder shell protecting an embryo.

Black raspberry blossoms have already turned to embedding a tiny seed in an aggregate fruit of 20 or more miniature plums all meant to pass through an animal’s digestive track uncooked, unharmed and ready to germinate.

Blackberries are blooming, too and lag a few weeks behind blackcaps.

Wild strawberries are rarely worth the effort but fun to pick, eat, and run to the next accessory fruit. Mulberries come on trees and go great in pies.

All of these fruits have special names to engage botanists and horticulturalists. Berries, pomes, drupes, hesperidiums, multiple, accessory, legumes, achenes, samaras, grains, and nuts are just the beginning.

Chestnuts and hazelnuts are nuts, and corn kernels are grains.

Fruits and nuts are maturing and provide an easy method of predicting where deer, turkeys, squirrels, bears, ducks, and grouse will go this summer and fall.

Squirrels can’t wait. They are already clipping maple twigs and scampering down to eat a single seed from a maple’s samara fruit.

Ginseng diggers, photographers, and admirers use ginseng’s red berries to locate the plant. Diggers are asked to squeeze out the two seeds and plant them correctly. Farmers who want to better protect ginseng from poachers will remove the red fruits, plant the seeds and conceal the bounty.

Retiring Shawna McDowell, Wisconsin Department of Natural resources field warden in Vernon County for 20 years, made a reputation of helping farmers protect their ginseng plants from trespassers. A replacement will be named to fill that role along with wardens in those ginseng-rich counties.

Tulip poplar trees are beginning to bloom. Turkey poults are hearing mother hens’ calls to assemble. Whitetail fawns are trailing behind their sources of milk but also nipping at vegetation.

— Jerry Davis is a freelance writer who lives in Barneveld. He can be reached at sivadjam@mhtc.net or at 608-924-1112.