Natural clones

• Button

  • Location: Dover
  • Registered: 22 Jul 2016
  • Posts: 3,109
  28 September 2019     21:18359541
  #1      
  Went for a drink with sons no.s 1 and 2 this week and could have done with inviting WGS because the conversation, as usual avoiding politics, was weird even by our standards. The topic was clones in nature (see, told you) - not a subject I'd contemplated before.
  
  Consider: strawberries can send out runners which, when they touch the ground, grow their own roots. The single plant is thus rooted more than once. Cut the runner, and both rooted bits then exist separately, two plants now but genetically identical. Same goes for buttercups, some laurels, etc.
  
  So the next time you eat a strawberry, the plant it comes from could, I guess, be older than you. Sort of.
  
  Makes you wonder about dahlias (which I've grown before) and gladdies (which I haven't but whose bulbs are doing some really weird stuff.
  Jan Higgins and Bob Whysman like this
  (Not my real name.)
• Bob Whysman

  • Registered: 23 Aug 2013
  • Posts: 1,948
  28 September 2019     21:54359543
  #2      
  You should have waited a day or two after having your drinking session Button and then you could have described how your strawberries came to fruition in a more colourful way.
  
  Also a little known fact is that some dahlias could belong to musical group as they have tubers and of course it’s well known that daffodils have trumpets too.
  
  
  Now I know what inspired this song:-
  
  
  
  
  
  Perhaps Parliament should be used as an allotment as it was propagated recently and they have been dishing the dirt.
  
  
  Do nothing and nothing happens.
• Weird Granny Slater

  • Location: Dover
  • Registered: 7 Jun 2017
  • Posts: 3,095
  29 September 2019     11:52359551
  #3      
  Thanks B, old bean, but you wouldn't have found me much help, as I know zilch about runners, and my knowledge of things botanical extends to gin only (and even then I stop just the right side of cucumber). As for strawberries, I could offer that 'Strawberry Fields Forever' should be called 'Strawberry Field Forever' but probably wouldn't sound half as good, that there's an obscure song by Ron Sexsmith called 'Strawberry Blonde' which is rather wistful and a little navel-gazing, that I've never seen Walpole's Strawberry Hill House but I have read The Castle of Otranto, and that in my distant youth I knew someone with a strawberry mark who was nicknamed 'Strawberry' by some cruelly unimaginative children. As for Dahlias, I refer you to James Ellroy, or perhaps Alan Ladd.
  'Pass the cow dung, my dropsy's killing me' - Heraclitus