Virused Bulbs

William Aley aley_wd@me.com
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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