PLANT EVOLUTION - MY LITTLE PINE TREE WHICH GROWS A CYPRESS BRANCH

PLANT EVOLUTION - MY LITTLE PINE TREE WHICH GROWS A CYPRESS BRANCH

 Although I do not have a large space in our backyard, I love plants and gardening. I do not have any educational background about plants and trees but I glory in my daily encounters with my plants crowding in our backyard. I am a bonsai hobbyist of about 19 years and have since maintained more than a hundred bonsai art specimens mostly of the Ficus varieties. I started to love doing it as an antidote of the stresses that came about by the pressures of a banking career. My trees are not as good looking as many of those on display because of limited space and very crowded environment. Yet my bonsai trees have stayed strong and alive for years.

About ten years ago, I bought a tiny pine tree from a plant dealer. I already have one larger specimen of the same pine variety. I placed this new specimen in a shallow bonsai pot, but I noticed that it never improved. Fearing that it might die, I planted it in a small but deeper rubber pot. Still I found that it has not developed according to my expectations. So I placed it together with other seemingly failed specimens.

More than a year ago, I noticed that a new bud of different variety grew in one of its small branches. I noted that its leaves correspond to that of a cypress tree. I know and understand that they are of the same family of conifers or pines but I never expected that an ordinary Philippine pine will have produced a cypress branch. It is even more surprising because I do not have any Cypress tree specimens in my bonsai collections. There are large and tall pines growing in front of our home but are of different variety either.  I thought that this must have been an actual evolution phenomenon.

The many bonsai specimens I have at home are of different varieties of ficus. They are in rows very close from each other, but never did I observe even one of them producing a branch of another ficus variety.

I searched from Google – Wikipedia and I found that “Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.”  For plant evolution I found this meaning; “Plant evolution is an aspect of the study of biological evolution, involving predominantly evolution of plants suited to live on land, greening of various land masses by the filling of their niches with land plants, and diversification of group of land plants.”

I learned though that plants and trees usually evolve through seeds. I did not find any literature about a branch of a different variety evolving or growing from another variety of a mother tree. Modern agriculture introduced grafting to grow a branch by uniting a shoot into a growing plant by insertion or close contact. Usually this grafted bud is of the same plant family even if of different variety.

Most recently I found that a new bud grows on the cypress branch but is again of the mother tree variety.

I really find this phenomenon interesting for I have observed it only once in my whole life. I would truly appreciate if biologists, horticulturists, foresters, bonsai hobbyist and other plant and agricultural experts could explain this occurrence.