How can anyone not love biology. Such wonderful madness.
You run into this issue when you want to graft plants. That is, cut a piece of one plant, stick it on another plant whose top you chopped off, stick them together with tape, wait and then have them fuse into one functional plant with the roots of one plant and bearing the fruit of the other, which obviously has fantastic applications, and is done all the time. Seriously. If you plant your apple tree’s apples, you get a plant with the properties of your apple tree and whatever your apple tree fucked, which may well not be edible. If you want more of the existing apples you like, you chop off bits of your tree and stick them onto other younger trees. This is how most fruit cultivation is done. You can do it yourself. There is no special trick to it, plants can’t tell themselves apart from plants that are roughly related, and will interpret the surgery as an injury in themselves they then heal by fusing with another.
And with that, you suddenly realise that a lot of plants that look rather similar to you are in fact quite unrelated and will refuse to fuse, while others that look drastically different happily will. I next intend to try to convince my invasive English laurel bush to fuse with cherry tree branches. That way I would get to keep the pretty hedge, but produce edible fruits rather than invasive ones. I feel like Frankenstein. It is delightful.
How can anyone not love biology. Such wonderful madness.
You run into this issue when you want to graft plants. That is, cut a piece of one plant, stick it on another plant whose top you chopped off, stick them together with tape, wait and then have them fuse into one functional plant with the roots of one plant and bearing the fruit of the other, which obviously has fantastic applications, and is done all the time. Seriously. If you plant your apple tree’s apples, you get a plant with the properties of your apple tree and whatever your apple tree fucked, which may well not be edible. If you want more of the existing apples you like, you chop off bits of your tree and stick them onto other younger trees. This is how most fruit cultivation is done. You can do it yourself. There is no special trick to it, plants can’t tell themselves apart from plants that are roughly related, and will interpret the surgery as an injury in themselves they then heal by fusing with another.
And with that, you suddenly realise that a lot of plants that look rather similar to you are in fact quite unrelated and will refuse to fuse, while others that look drastically different happily will. I next intend to try to convince my invasive English laurel bush to fuse with cherry tree branches. That way I would get to keep the pretty hedge, but produce edible fruits rather than invasive ones. I feel like Frankenstein. It is delightful.