Shelley
shocked the world with her gothic horror treatise, widely regarded as the first
true science fiction novel rather than fantasy, because it drew on scientific
concepts of the day. Pulled together
from pieces of cadavers, the monster was reanimated through electricity from
lightning.
A
sewn-together creation of bits and pieces is nice and all, but gardeners know
her tale isn’t as far-fetched as we’re asked to believe. We’ve been doing this for thousands of
years. We live with creatures grafted
together all the time; in fact, we search them out and make them the
centerpiece of our landscapes.
Some are
subtle; so seamlessly grafted you don’t realize its two different plants put
together. Others show the graft proudly,
and gardeners use this to guide them in planting to proper depth. Grafting provides us with plants that are
sturdier, more disease resistant, or smaller than the original. It’s how we get cultivars of the same fruit
on tree after tree in orchards so we can enjoy Honeycrisp apples or Cresthaven
peaches.
In order
to make sweet, edible apples one needs to grow the exact cultivar by cloning as
grafts on rootstocks. If you try to grow them from seed, you get the result of
apple flowers crossing with other, usually crabapples.
It’s also
how we have trees sporting several different fruits on the same plant. Often called “fruit cocktail” or “fruit
salad” trees, gardeners with big desires but small space can have it all: with
four, five, even six different fruits on a single trunk. Nectarines, plums, apricots, and peaches or
red, green, and yellow apples come together in a fusion of flavor.
Scientists
are running wild having successfully grafted fruit trees they’re grafting
anything that doesn’t move in the garden: tomatoes, melons, the neighborhood
rabbits. Ok, maybe not the rabbits, but
horticulturists are very excited about grafting.
Clones, too,
surround us; they give us perfect replicas of plants we covet at other’s homes
or businesses. Technically, the definition of plant cloning is human-controlled
asexual propagation of a plant, which doesn’t sound fun at all. But we do it all the time.
While Victor
Frankenstein raided graveyards for his body bits, we raid plants we see while
walking the neighborhood or sitting at the doctor’s office awaiting our
turn. With a quick, surreptitious pinch,
we snitch a bit of plant to put in water for rooting, thus cloning the
plant. Love that African violet? Pinch off a leaf and plant it. The begonia at an atrium in the mall? They root nicely from leaves as well
(readers: denuding a plant you don’t own is unethical. Ask permission before taking anything from
the plants you see).
When it comes to
bringing things back from the dead, gardeners have much in common with Victor;
anyone who’s had a jade plant fall and shatter into pieces knows the desire to
resurrect it by shoving a bit of stem or leaf into potting mix (the leaves
should be dried a bit before doing this, but that’s a different story). It takes a while for the leaf to root but
shocking it with electricity to speed things up would end in disaster.
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