Offset (botany) in the context of "Cultivar"

⭐ In the context of Cultivar propagation, an Offset (botany) is best understood as…

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⭐ Core Definition: Offset (botany)

In botany and horticulture, an offset (also called a pup, mainly in the US,) is a small, virtually complete daughter plant that has been naturally and asexually produced on the mother plant. They are clones, meaning that they are genetically identical to the mother plant. They can divide mitotically. In the plant nursery business and gardens, they are detached and grown in order to produce new plants. This is a cheap and simple process for those plants that readily produce offsets as it does not usually require specialist materials and equipment.

An offset or 'pup' may also be used as a broad term to refer to any short shoot originating from the ground at the base of another shoot. The term 'sucker' has also been used as well, especially for bromeliads, which can be short lived plants and when the parent plant has flowered, they signal the root nodes to form new plants.

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👉 Offset (botany) in the context of Cultivar

A cultivar is a kind of cultivated plant that people have selected for desired traits and which retains those traits when propagated. Methods used to propagate cultivars include division, root and stem cuttings, offsets, grafting, tissue culture, or carefully controlled seed production. Most cultivars arise from deliberate human manipulation, but some originate from wild plants that have distinctive characteristics. Cultivar names are chosen according to rules of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP), and not all cultivated plants qualify as cultivars. Horticulturists generally believe the word cultivar was coined as a term meaning "cultivated variety".

Popular ornamental plants like roses, camellias, daffodils, rhododendrons, and azaleas are commonly cultivars produced by breeding and selection or as sports, for floral colour or size, plant form, or other desirable characteristics. Similarly, the world's agricultural food crops are almost exclusively cultivars that have been selected for characters such as improved yield, flavour, and resistance to disease. Since the advent of genetic engineering in the 1970s and the rise of its application in crop breeding in the 1980s, very few wild plants are used as commercial food sources. Trees used in forestry are also special selections grown for their enhanced quality and yield of timber, for example American timber company Weyerhaeuser is the leading grower of genetically modified Douglas-fir trees, one of the most commonly harvested trees.

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Offset (botany) in the context of Mother plant

A mother plant is a plant grown for the purpose of taking cuttings or offsets in order to grow more quantity of the same plant.

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