Cool plants from the lab: visiting Micro Paradox
As you may know, quite a few of the plants we love and have growing in our gardens aren’t propagated vegetatively, through seeds or offsets, but start life in a lab. This includes not only many of my beloved agaves and mangaves, but also most commercially grown perennials and even the orchids you find in grocery stores and garden centers. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to go on a field trip with my volunteer group from the UC Davis Arboretum Teaching Nursery to visit a plant tissue culture lab in the Sacramento area. I already had a high-level understanding of what tissue culture (or micropropagation) is and how it’s done, but I had never seen a lab in operation, so I was stoked to go. I read somewhere that a tissue culture lab is essentially a plant factory combined with a surgical operating room. That’s a good comparison. Instead of growing plants in soil from seeds or traditional cuttings, technicians culture plants in sterile, nutrient-rich gels inside glass or plastic c...