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What Are You Working On?
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I have a small backyard tree nursery which I use to grow rare species I give away to friends and acquaintances who have space to plant them.
A lot of people don’t realize that climate change means species that we grew for shade historically won’t necessarily thrive in the future, and since we usually hope the trees we plant will live for 20+ years, we need to plan ahead. So I’m testing which species can be heat and drought tolerant enough to provide shade and other environmental benefits in the future.
This is awesome. Are we best friends now? I have a background in plant tissue culture, especially micropropagation of woody species. I don't do that professionally anymore, mostly because I have other skills that the job market likes better. However, I always have a propagation experiment of some kind going.
I think you are doing great work and your vision is very clear-eyed. Even from a grubby capitalist perspective, tree nurseries are a good future-proof business because climate changes are going to necessitate a lot of re-planting. It's that kind of local knowledge you are making that if more widespread will help us develop the resilience to maybe, just maybe, get through the next couple of centuries.
Cool! I don’t have much experience with the more technical forms of propagation, so I usually just grow from seed. That could be useful though, there is a species I’ve become interested in recently that grows great but doesn’t produce seed locally for some reason, so it’d be interesting to know what my options are there.
If by chance you are in Northern California I’d be interested in collaborating. I could also share what species I’m growing if that interests you but they’re somewhat specific to my local climate/soils.
Ahh, sadly, I'm in Colorado, so any collaboration would have to be remote and more of a knowledge-share than a direct collaboration, due to the different ways climate change will impact our regions. I've found some really good tree-suitability studies for Albuquerque area and have been paring down the list of most-suitable trees for that region. The thought process is that over time conditions here in central CO will come to resemble current-day ABQ more and more.
Seed-grown trees are the correct method for specific planting types like ecological restoration plantings, you want the genetic diversity. For formal street and yard tree plantings, clonal propagation can be preferred so you know the form the tree will take in a space-constrained setting. Many trees have bushy, shrubby genotypes and taller forms with proper canopies, so seeds become an undesirable crap-shoot when space is tight.
So, nothing wrong with propagating from seed, in fact it has many benefits in the right setting. The micropropagation is most useful when you need strict control over the genotype. It all depends on your vision of where you want the trees you grow to be planted.
Always happy to talk plants. Feel free to DM me if you feel like diving deeper someday. If there are particular species you want to propagate by cloning, I'd be happy to help you find protocols that show how to start figuring out the process for each. That's the hard part about tissue culture, you have to develop protocols specific for each species. There are general principles, but every genotype responds differently in culture, so it's a bit of intense R&D to really get the Xerox machine going.
Well there may be more overlap than you think. We’re both semi-arid climates with increasing climate-related heat and drought impacts. Your climate might rule out some of the more frost sensitive plants, and truly Mediterranean species that can’t handle the summer monsoon. And you’ll be able to grow some slightly more heat and drought sensitive plants than we can.
If you haven’t seen this document yet, it’s a great resource for Albuquerque and the greater SW. https://www.nature.org/content/dam/tnc/nature/en/documents/Climate-Ready-Trees-Report-Nov2020.pdf
Just be sure you don’t get ahead of the current climate. Some trees that may thrive in the coming decades might not be able to make it through a colder than average winter. It’s easy to assume we won’t have those anymore but they are still possible, just less likely each year. It’s OK (and fun) to push the boundaries a little but we have people here trying to plant mangoes with the assumption we won’t have frost again which is a bit optimistic.
The species I can’t grow from seed is Cupressus/Hesperocyparis (depending on your preferred taxonomy) guadalupensis if you have any tips there!
Thanks for the link to the Nature report. That's been my main info source for the little side project I mentioned. There are many arid-adapted trees from further south that will almost, but not quite, thrive along the Front Range due to frost sensitivity. I'm trying to observe as many of these species in real life as I can to see which might be most aesthetically desirable to a CO homeowner or municipality that wants to grow a water-wise specimen tree 10 years from now.
I had a feeling the species you were having trouble with germinating from seed was a gymnosperm. Everything you said just fits the profile of the special challenges they offer. As far as tissue culture, it's a bit of an advanced challenge since the only method that seems to work for large scale multiplication in gymnosperms generally is embryo culture or somatic embryogenesis. Frankly, those methods are hard and require a properly equipped lab. There's a lot of tissue culture you can do in a clean home kitchen, but somatic embryogenesis requires lots of growth regulator chemicals and the right equipment to maintain stringent sterility, not just cleanliness.
So, from a practical perspective, 'macropropagation' (just rooting larger cuttings really) is preferred for cypresses generally. However, even that is more challenging than most other trees.
Here's a typical somewhat current paper breaking down the extra care needed to get cypress cuttings to take root. https://riojournal.com/article/52947/
If you are ambitious or just curious, this one shows the typical protocol needed for embryo culture. It also explains in the intro the biological reason why your seed germination rate is so low. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6214434/
The last paper may guide you to finding or creating the conditions needed to get seed batches that germinate at a decent rate, yet another strategy to overcome the difficult propagation of these species.
These are only a jumping off point, the literature is massive on this topic. Hope it helps. Thanks for engaging, it's fun.
Thanks, I'll check out the papers!
This is so interesting! When I was growing up we had a small orchard in our backyard with a wide variety of apples, plums, pears, etc. We used to do something similar and give out cuttings to anyone who asked so there's clones of those trees all over the area as far as 3-ish hours away that I know of. When us kids grew up my parents sold the house but my Dad took cuttings from all the different apple trees and spliced them onto a root stock at the new house to make hybrids with all the varieties from our old house. Unfortunately my parents both passed and before my partner and I were able to move back to the family home someone who was helping us out with the yard work ran over the hybrid-apple tree with the riding lawn mower 😑 so its no longer with us either.
Very cool story but sad ending. I’ve seen many a tree lost to lawn mowers unfortunately. Maybe you could try reaching out to some of those people who your dad gifted trees to and see if you could bring them back?