Identification: Seedlings of the Rootstock?

Hi,

There are some seedlings that have appeared in the pot of one of my dissectums (there are 6 of them). Do these look like Japanese Maple seedlings from the seeds of this dissectum?

If they are, I would like to save them for my first grafting attempt. What do you think they are?

 

Not maples, looks like some type of herbaceous perennial.

 

What a pitty... :( I got hopeful thinking that it has lobes and never saw such a seedling in my garden.

 

Btw, can anyone ID these?

 

Might be a type of wormwood. Are they aromatic?

The rootstock would have to be allowed to flower and set seed, drop those seeds before seedlings of it were possible. But it sounds like you meant the scion, rather than the stock.

 

Thanks for your response. No, it is not aromatic.

If this grafted tree dropped its seeds, wouldn't those seeds come out exactly as the rootstock rather than what is grafted to it?

I thought that maybe before I bought this tree it had dropped its seeds on the pot.

 

Hi Kanuni,

The scion wood that is grafted to the root stock is the cultivar. The stock itself has "unknown qualities" beyond (and even then only sometimes!) green or red leaves; some like to graft red cultivars to red stock.

Once the graft starts growing, it is a biological clone of the parent tree. That's the loose definition of a cultivar; so any seeds are the same seeds as the parent would have had assuming the same pollination. (In fact DNA exchange between the stock and the graft has been shown in the vicinity of the graft union, but I have never heard of variation being shown near or in flowers.)

So the seeds that will drop will be the same as those of the cultivar, not the stock.

However there is very wide variation between palmatum seeds, which is the reason lots of us have a lot of fun growing seeds... :) So offspring of the cultivar are not usually going to resemble the cultivar.

There are exceptions: children from red seed are often red; from sango kaku sometimes have nice red stems; from dissectums are frequently dissected; from shigitatsu sawa are often reticulated, etc. The whole "Ghost" series is selected from seeds of shigitatsu sawa IIRC.

In any case the seeds are never "exactly like the parents" because in fact the parents are typically desirable examples of the hugely variable children generally. And of course there are mostly 2 parents, which is where garden hybrids come from. But they are different than what you'd get if the root stock grew out and made samaras.

Young plants don't typically have enough energy to make seeds anyway, but regardless the root stock is not grown in-situ, so whatever grows in the pot couldn't really come from it.

-E

 

Thanks for the great educational post.

 

Any resulting seedlings would be from whichever part of the combination of two different plants had managed to produce seeds. If you leave sprouts from a rootstock in place long enough for it to set seed then you can get rootstock seedlings, as well as those from any fruits that might be produced by the scion (the plant grafted on top).