Biannual Seed Yield, Viability and Germination in Commiphora wightii (Arnott) Bhandari

Commiphora wightii is an important medicinal tree of arid and semi-arid regions of India. It is commonly known as Guggal and belongs to family Burseraceae. It is dioecious in nature and male plants are extremely rare. Female plants produce seeds through apomixis. The slow growing nature, low seed viability and germination, excessive tapping for oleogum resin (known as guggul) put this plant under critically endangered categories in IUCN red data book. It is also reported earlier that this plant produces two types of seeds viz. black seed with higher viability and white seed with no or very poor viability. Therefore, Present study was carried out with the aim to identify the right mature seed harvesting period with higher viable seeds ratio which will be helpful in raising nursery and large-scale plantation of Guggul. The mature seeds were collected from 647 guggal plants (10 years old) from Deesa, Gujarat, India in summer (July, 2017) and winter (November and December, 2017). There is no significant difference in percentage of plants bearing mature seeds but number of mature seeds per seed producing plant was significantly higher in winter (72.51 seeds) as compared with summer (10.19 seeds). The proportion of black seed in summer and winter was almost opposite i.e. in winter 70.9% seeds were black whereas in summer only 30% black seeds were found. Seed germination data revealed that black seeds collected in winter showed higher seed germination (13.6%) than summer (2.1%). White seed collected in summer failed to germinate whereas very low seed germination was observed in winter (1.2%).