Virused Bulbs
William Aley (Mon, 07 Apr 2014 12:28:59 PDT)
I work with pathologists. It's a dark and gloomy plant world through their ocular perspective of plant imports. The un-calculable probability of cross infection and potential damage to monoculture from one disease crossover is too grave of a risk. Thus the movement to exclude and prohibit plant imports until a pest risk assessment has been completed.
William Aley
Silver Spring, MD
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 7, 2014, at 3:06 PM, Rodger Whitlock <totototo@telus.net> wrote:
On 7 Apr 2014, at 8:59, Jerald Lehmann wrote:
I'm trying to figure out what is so bad about growing virused plants.
The issue (or so it seems to me) isn't that virus X slightly weakens plant Y;
it's that the same virus will kill plant Z.
A further point: any plant propagated vegetatively will gradually become
infected by more and more viruses. Each virus does little, but in aggregate
they weaken a plant making it progressively less easy to grow and propagate.
The cleaner the growing conditions, the more slowly this process takes place.
This is probably the reason that many (most?) old cultivars of various garden
plants are out of cultivation. Or take Cosmos atrosanguineus for example: forty
years ago Graham Stuart Thomas considered it miffy and difficult, and it was
effectively unobtainable. Then someone must have run it through tissue culture
and gotten rid of the accumulated viruses, and these days it's widely available
and easily grown.
To put this in other words: you may think virus infections are innocuous, but
they aren't.
--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Z. 7-8, cool Mediterranean climate
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