Unlike many other fruit trees, avocados are hard to root. Rooting is where you cut a branch off a tree and stick it partly in the ground or a container so that the cut branch will form roots where it is buried. It’s a way of copying, or cloning, a tree. Try this with a fig or a pomegranate and you’ll likely succeed.
Not with avocados. Researchers have spent decades experimenting with avocado cuttings in order to get them to root more easily and reliably, but to this day the process remains comparatively difficult.
Keep this in mind as you encounter this tree:
It appears to root relatively easily, right?
But what exactly is the usefulness of such a tree? One, if its fruit is superb, then you could make copies of it to grow and share. Two, if the fruit is not superb, it has potential as a rootstock.
A cutting from this tree could be rooted, and then an avocado variety with a superior fruit could be grafted on top. Such a rootstock is called a clonal rootstock, as distinguished from one that has been grown from a seed. The advantage of a clonal rootstock is that it is a copy of the original tree and should grow just like the original tree whereas a seedling rootstock is always a little different, sometimes very different, from its parent (just like a human child is).
So imagine this: The tree above roots easily, making it faster and cheaper to turn into a clonal rootstock than most other avocado trees. Maybe it roots so easily that even you and I can get it to root at home. And then when used as a clonal rootstock, it turns out to grow a tough and productive tree with a grafted top that makes whatever fruit you like — Gwen, Fuerte, Reed, etc.
Such potential is why Stefan Koehne is stewarding this tree now. See my previous post on Stefan and “Stewarding avocado trees.”
Special thanks to Stefan Koehne for showing me this remarkable avocado tree.
Learn more about avocado rootstocks in my post here.
Learn a bit about the history and progression of rooting and cloning avocados in these articles:
(1937) “Rooting avocado cuttings,” by E.R. Eggers and F.F. Halma.
(1971) “Use of the etiolation technique in rooting avocado cuttings,” by E.F. Frolich and R.G. Platt.
(1999) “Micro cloning: a multiple cloning technique for avocados using micro containers,” by A.A. Ernst.
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