AusBonsai

Just wondering if anyone has grown Nothofagus cunninghamii from seed?

One of the bigger trees I dug last year now has lots of little flowers. From my understanding, they normally only produce a good crop of seed every 3 or 4 years, and are less likely to once I start wiring/pruning etc. So I figured I might try and collect some seeds from it now, it'd be cool to have trees grown from seed from my own tree.

Any tips on when to harvest the seed and growing conditions would be appreciated. I've seen one site that says to plant them straight away, and another site said to stratify for 1-2 months, but there's not a lot of references I could find.

I don't have experience with Northofagus, but my experience with other seed that apparently requires stratification, like Japanese Maple, is that fresh seed sown immediately has a very good germination rate. Once the seed has dried out, it then needs the stratification to break its dormancy. My guess would be that Northofagus would be the same. However you could try both and report back and help others by building direct experience to the knowledge bank.

Thanks for your thoughts.
If I get enough viable seed, I think I'll try halt with and half without stratification. That way I'll have a comparison of the success rates for any future attempts.

I'm interested to see the results - keep us posted! I'm sure there's a few people here that would be interested in seeds of you get more in the future too, myself included

Yes, I'll update this thread with the results when I give it a go.
From the little bit of info I can find, the seeds probably won't be ready for another month or two. It began flowering right at the beginning of October (or maybe late Sept and I didn't notice, as the flowers are discrete). The available information indicates it flowers Oct-Dec and best seed collection is Jan-Feb.

I have seen seeds available to purchase, but a document from a forestry site indicated seed viability drops dramatically after 6 months so I'm not sure how good purchased seed would be.

any updates was down in Tassie and is definitely a tree I want now.

I did the old soak and sink viability test, and only one sank.
I tried a bunch of seed anyway, and only 1 germinated.

So the seeds weren't successful, but they seem to grow readily from cuttings.

To your first question, when did you collect? You may have taken too early?

I left them on until they were dried out and opening, and some of them that were further along had already dropped their seed.
Collected them in a several batches as they matured.
First lot was late December, some were late Jan/early Feb.