I have a question and I need the answerLet's say you have a tree that could live to be 1000 years old, and you take a cutting of it when it's 700 years oldDoes the successfully rooted cutting die in 300 years, or in another 1000 years?Does cutting an old plant artificially age it, in whole or partially, or does cutting an old plant restart the timeline of growth so to speak?
>>2879853Not a professional, but grew up on a wholesale nursery, took cuttings, grafted, balled and burlapped plenty of shrubs to decent sized shade trees and evergreens. I'm pretty sure it restarts the timeline, because you're taking cuttings from new growth, and plants don't age exactly like animals do. I could be wrong though, you might try /out/ with this one.
>>2879853This is the most interesting question I’ve ever read.Anyway, since some trees send up “suckers” when you try and kill the tree, they’re kind of like self-created, pre-planted cuttings, and they form new distinct organisms just like a seed and restart the clock as it were.So I assume the same is true for cuttings.Also, they found out that a kind of invasive grass intentially cuts through itself to propagate. Again, clock re-starts.There’s deterministic and non-deterministic plants, like annuals which die every year (on a clock, whether or not winter comes), and others that don’t, but maybe their lifespan is limited by size or something.
>>2879853Plants don't have genetic aging, only practical "death from old age" (growing too big to sustain themselves + running out of nutrients, or living so long that random environmental factors destroy them). So each new plant starts from 0.
>>2879872It's very common in commercial fruit trees to graft a cutting/scion from a younger tree onto a more mature rootstock in order to advance the time before the first harvest by several years.
>>2879872>>2879928>>2879939>>2879952Thank y'all very much, I really appreciate all the information
>>2879952Yeah, makes sense. I'm the 80's it was common to let cheap ornamental fruit trees grow into a maybe 3' tall whip, then run over then with a bush hog. When they suckered back out it looked like a graft if you didn't know what was up and they charged more for a "grafted" tree once it got up to 5'-6'.
In terms of longevity, each grafted seedling/freshly rooted cutting or just a freshly rooted cutting "restarts" the counter. Trees do have a predicted lifespan, e.g., apple trees live approximately as long as human, while e.g. pear or white mulberry trees can stay alive for 150 years. But when you cut a twig from a 150yr old mulberry and root it, it's going to live for the next up to 150years.Generally, the new tree is a clone of the old one, so it's a kind of continuity, which matters for the tree bears same fruits. With respect to this the first tissue with a specific genotype appeared say, the 300 years back i time.There's one important "catch" there: trees, like all organisms, sometimes make mistakes when copying their genetic material to new cells. This is called "mutations", and if one's unlucky, this ends up being a cancer. But most of these mutations are harmless for the health condition, yet change the genes of (a part of) the tree, so you might get a cutting of a slightly altered genotype, which obviously alters the tree properties. A tree mutated away from its variety is called 'sport', at least for fruit trees (see e.g., https://realenglishfruit.co.uk/fruit-tree-sports/).AFAIK cloning animals, like the dolly sheep, yields the same observations.
