Hello! So I’ve been reading this book chapter about apples and in it it says that apples grown from seed tend to be very different from the apple from which the seed came, and frequently lack desired characteristics. Later on in the chapter, it says that what growers do is they usually graft together a rootstock and a scion to form an apple tree that has desired characteristics (and that also bears fruit with desired characteristics?). But the rootstock and scion are grown from seed, no? So how do they come together and produce fruit that is similar to apples that have been grown on the orchard in the past and that DOES have desired characteristics? I feel like there is something fundamental that I am not getting. Any help understanding this would be appreciated.
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You plant an apple seed and then, when the new tree has grown a little, you graft a branch (“scion”) from another, already grown tree on it. The tree from which you took the branch produced the kind of apples that you need, and so the grafted branch will “stay true” and produce the same kind of apples. The root and the bottom part of the combined tree came from a seed, but since you replaced the top from which the fruits will come, it doesn’t matter. Basically all the apple trees of the same type like, say, Red Delicious, are clones of the one tree from 19th century, or at least their top parts are. They were all grown from grafted branches, not seeds. The seeds only provided them with their root systems and lower stems.
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