During my bumbling botanising over the last couple of years I've come across the term "viviparous" a few times – in connection with mosses if I remember rightly. Although I looked up its meaning and tried to understand it from its context, I never felt I'd really understood it until today when I found this ribwort plantain. I brought it in to show Toad and asked him if it was an example of viviparousness. He said that in zoology viviparousness refers live births rather than an egg. That figures, I thought: here we have a plant where a seed or seed head would normally be. It's good when something finally clicks.
Actually, the definition of viviparity in Wikipedia is quite good. Clearly I didn't look there earlier! It does say that the term covers a range of things, "no definitive and exclusive terminology is universally accepted", so my lack of clear understanding was forgiveable, I reckon.
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