How do we the source the plant material
for actual use in the nursery and that depends on the plant
and
and how it grows. So
I would say sixty to seventy
percent maybe even higher. It might be as high as 80 percent is seed grown
and then reason for that. Yeah, genetic diversity.
We're aiming to not create clones of a lot of things necessarily.
You know unless we find something that's specifically super
attractive or useful.
We want the diversity within within the plants to come out.
So you'll get color variation in the flowers. You might get
color variation in the foliage
or even in the bracks. Not just this plant specifically. I'm just using it because it happens to be right behind
me. Like you see this one has a purple
and this one does not. That's what happens with
seed variability and sometimes you get something really strikingly
different that way.
Perhaps even a better berry
or ornamental or you get a plant with a bigger root.
There's any kind of number things that could happen
in which case then you might want to take cuttings or root divisions
which probably accounts for another
10 - 15 percent of the nursery production. That would be clonal production but we also do
clonal production
whereas we take as many cuttings from as many different plants as possible to
mimic diversity to get a diverse
selection and woodland phlox would be a classic example because it's
very variable
in color. You'll have white ones, blue ones, pink ones
in various shades and so we take cuttings from all those different forms
and we end up with
something that looks like it was produced by seed
and seed collection on some others woodland plants can be difficult. The seed
production is limited. Germination is
erratic and so it's actually just easier to produce them via cuttings
and then there's division. Yeah and division's done usually for a similar reason
but this is a classic division plant because it tends
be somewhat stoleniferous and spreading so you can use chop
one of these and get like 4, 5, 6 plants out of one pot
but these are seed grown.
This plant was
planted from seed, grown from seed
and with so, within the genum or within the genetic
make up of this plant, there are color forms
for it: white or pink and sometimes you can get even really
very pink ones and you also get foliage differences to. Some of them the foliage is
very blue and some of
it's more of a green. So there's a lot of
variation within plants and some of them are even... you know, this is usually two-tone. It's
either white or pink.
You can get some plants to have a much stronger variation
within the plant in terms a flower color but you also get
different height variations sometimes. You can get
tolerances to drought in some cases.
There's all kinds of genetic potential locked up in all plants. And do you know what one of
the main ones is?
This is what I've noticed. One of the
main genetic variations is flower
time. Within even a single population
of a species, you will notice that
they bloom. There will be earlier blooming ones and later blooming ones.
That is the
strategy to handle
changing environmental factors that might prevent the earlier bloomers
from setting seed or vice versa the later bloomers from setting seed. In other words,
they're covering all their bets. Fire pink is a good example of that actually now that I
think about it because fire pink is a little red flower
the blooms in May... some populations
but then there are some populations that bloom in June and there are some
populations bloom in July.
This is allegheny pachysandra and that's the native pachysandra.
There is actually an American one and while
Asian pachysandras usually root, produce through root divisions because it's a
fast spreader.
This tends to form a clump so you can't really do,
well you can do root division on it but the results are minimal.
So you can do cuttings on these and so basically I've severed this from the
parent plant.
I've removed almost all the leaves. On some plants I'll remove even more and maybe
I'm
you know, basically just cutting them off and then
setting them in a sterile medium of peat and perlite
under mist. This will come on periodically to
keep the leaves moist and in some cases I've not only removed the leaves, I've cut the remaining
leaves in half and the whole idea is to reduce
the evaporation
or the expiration of the plant from from water loss
through the leaves. So
anyway we produce a number of plants this way.