Seeds and Seedlings

A seed is a baby plant with a packed lunch. Inside the coat is an embryo, a tiny root and shoot, and a store of food to fuel it until its first leaves can make their own sugar from light. Everything the seedling does underground, it does on that lunch.

Two stages are easy to blur. Germination is the seed waking up: it swells with water, and the root and shoot break out. Emergence is the shoot breaking through the surface into the light. A seed can germinate perfectly and still never emerge. So when a row doesn't come up, the seed may not have been dead; it may have woken and run out of lunch before it reached the light.