Name: Marvel of Seeds: Film Screening & Q&A
Start: 2026-01-03T17:15:00-05:00
Location: 56 Arbor Street, Hartford, CT, United States, Connecticut 06106

A New England Forests film, directed by naturalist, local nature documentary filmmaker, and friend of Real Art Ways, Ray Asselin.

This will be the theater premiere of OLD FOREST OR YOUNG MEADOW – THE MARVEL OF SEEDS and will kick off a series of Ray’s screenings for America 250 in the region. Ray has screened many projects at RAW over the years, including THE LOST FORESTS OF NEW ENGLAND and BEAVER POND WILDLIFE series.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Ray Asselin and Trinity College Professor and Hartford County's Old Growth Forest Network Coordinator Susan A. Masino.
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Have you ever thought about how, almost magically, a brown, bulldozed piece of land turns green with plants again? How do all those plants get there so quickly? Where did they come from? It’s amazing that nature has developed this process of having new plants always ready to go, in tiny embryonic packages.
Seeds allow us to readily raise crops. They replenish the forests we take down. They make burned habitat or lava-covered ground productive again.
Plants, like all life forms, do not live forever, so they must reproduce. They cast themselves into the future via the seeds they produce, which can wait out poor or impossible growth conditions until such time as conditions become favorable. That could be days, weeks, years, even millennia.
Since the parent plant can’t move around to place seeds here and there, it has to have some other way to get the seeds dispersed. And that’s the subject of the new film, Old Forest or Young Meadow – the Marvel of Seeds.
Plants have evolved over many millions of years. In that time, nature has devised some fascinating methods for them to colonize new sites. Some are rather mundane, but others are intriguing; some are surprising and quite entertaining.
This film describes the evolution of plants on Earth, and features many of the fascinating ways seeds are dispersed. Some are curious, some are downright delightful. Some, we guarantee, you have never witnessed.