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I took offence on behalf of the wonderful lady who won the auction, who isn't a galanthophile, had never bought a snowdrop in her life until last week, spent a great deal of money on an immensely romantic gesture and doesn't deserve to be pilloried on a forum she's never heard of.
What is chipping and twin scaling if not a sort of micropropagation? As a small specialist nurseryman I am ambivalent about propagating plants up in such large numbers because at the end of the day it actually reduces the 'value' of plants and makes it harder for small scale growers to do their own thing. On the other hand I spent amongst the most enjoyable time of my life working at John Innes where scientists were researching just these sorts of things, but primarily for improving the understanding and yields of food crops, and quality of husbandry (isn't that a good word when you view it's different meanings!). It seems to me we just all do our best on the basis of our own experience, and getting people together works best of all, which seems to have happened here in some curious way?
Indeed, Tim, chipping and twin scaling can be seen as a kind of micropropagation, probably somewhere in between microprop and a more traditional propagation form like taking cuttings, as it usually involves taking bulb material with a bit of the basal plate, which equates to the stem of a non-bulbous plant. Recently people have of course found that bulblets will grow from pieces of bulb material other than a fragment of basal plate - i.e. further up the chip or twin scale, or on rings or tops of bulbs with no basal plate attached at all. Which suggests that full micropropagation, using much smaller amounts of bulb material without necessarily any basal plate is feasible. And some experimentation has been done on that. But as far as I know there is no commercial set-up operational as yet.As to whether it helps the nurserymen, I suppose yes it's swings and roundabouts. There would be trade offs - prices would come down but then more people would be able to buy. As Joe Sharman apparently once said (and I apologise if I've heard it wrong and am misquoting him) "we don't need people buying more snowdrops so much as we need more people buying snowdrops".The scenario I was contemplating was a microprop lab somewhere developing protocols for galanthus microprop and offering a service to nurserymen to microprop rare varieties for them, which the nurserymen then sell to their customers. Not one big nursery cornering the market by developing microprop just for their own exclusive use.It's not the whole answer, I agree. But it could be part of the answer to the shortage of bulbs of new varieties available to buy and help both the nurserymen and the customers.
If chipping causes some stability issues in Galanthus such as South Hayes (which can revert back to almost white) then surely micropropagation would cause further issues?
This photo, of a pot I was given, dates back to March 2006. Mine died from a fungal attack probably due to me taking the lid off for the photo. I also have a thought that I dropped the pot