It’s springtime, mid-April. and this hedge looks mostly dead. Just one of the beech trees making up the hedge is producing fresh, green leaves. All the rest are covered with dried-up, brown leaves left over from last year. What’s going on?
This hedge consists of seedling beech, they are all different in many ways. They grow at different speeds, some slower, some faster. Their leaves will vary from one plant to the next, some will be paler, some darker. Some will be hairy, others may be smooth and glossy. The bark will vary in roughness and colour.
When you grow seedlings, whether beech or any other plant, every individual will be unique, for uniformity you must use cuttings or grafts so that each plant is genetically the same.
What you are seeing in this hedge is variation in timing; the beech closest to the camera comes into leaf earlier than the others, but in a few weeks from now they will all have green leaves. Garden and commercial plants are often identical to one another and are given names to distinguish them. Rose breeders, for example, grow thousands of seeds and select those few with outstanding colour, fragrance, disease resistance or any other desirable characteristic. The best of the best are bulked up by grafting, given a name like ‘Yorkshire Prince’ or ‘Summer Festival’, and then sold on to garden centres. Grow roses from seed to plant in your garden and you are likely to be badly disappointed (though you might get lucky and produce a winner).
The term ‘plant breeding’ includes breeding for seed production, for example to produce wheat or bean or squash seeds of a named type. This is a different (though allied) process from breeding for vegetative propagation as with roses.
See also
- Breeding roses – David Austin
- Plant breeding – Wikipedia
- Seedling variation – Isaac Physics
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