Vegetative Reproduction - Artificial Vegetative Propagation

Artificial Vegetative Propagation

Vegetative propagation of particular cultivars that have desirable characteristics is very common practice. Reasons for preferring vegetative rather than sexual means of reproduction vary, but commonly include greater ease and speed of propagation of certain plants, such as many perennial root crops and vines. Another major attraction is that the resulting plant amounts to a clone of the parent plant and accordingly is of a more predictable quality than most seedlings. However, as can be seen in many variegated plants, this does not always apply, because many plants actually are chimeras and cuttings might reflect the attributes of only one or some of the parent cell lines. Man-made methods of vegetative reproduction are usually enhancements of natural processes, but they range from rooting cuttings to grafting and artificial propagation by laboratory tissue culture.

In horticulture, a "cutting" is a piece that has been cut off from a mother plant and then caused to grow into a whole plant. Often this involves a piece of stem that is treated with rooting liquid or powder containing hormones. In some species root cuttings can produce shoot growth. When the cutting has become a self-sufficient plant, it is genetically identical to the mother plant except when chimeric tissues or similar complications affect the outcome.

A related form of regeneration is that of grafting. A stem piece or a single bud (the scion) is joined onto the stem of a plant that has roots (the rootstock), or a stem piece can be joined to a root piece. A popular use of grafting is to produce fruit trees, sometimes with more than one variety of the same fruit species growing from the same stem. Rootstocks for fruit trees are either seedlings or propagated by layering.