Even if you’re not a big YouTube fan, it’s likely you’ve heard of the creator who recently went viral after sharing an unexpectedly easy plant-cloning method to get your hands on ultra rare varieties.
Now, we all know that we can create more plants for free by learning how to propagate plants. Cloning them, though? Well, that’s always felt more like the domain of a mad professor from a sci-fi novel, and let’s face facts; Dr Frankenstein-inspired antics have never exactly felt like plant propagation methods for beginners.
So, when Plants In July accidentally crashed the rare plant market using a process called ’tissue culture’, you’d best believe our ears pricked up. Anything that helps us to replicate hard-to-find flora is alright in our books (within reason, obviously).
What is Tissue Culture?
Put simply, tissue culture refers to a very specific plant-cloning method. Made famous by Plants In Jars via YouTube, it basically involves taking a small piece of tissue from a pre-existing plant, sterilizing it, and placing it in a nutrient-rich gel to help it grow quickly.
“I think that the era of gatekeeping rare plants is over,” says Plants In Jars in her latest video. “Even if you do tissue culture very badly, you can still end up with a lot of plants. It’s a very powerful propagation tool.”
She adds: “Tissue culture is what collapses artificial scarcity the fastest, not just because it’s a very effective method for cloning lots and lots of plants and more people are doing it, but also because more people know about it and understand it in the first place.”
How Tissue Culture Can Solve a Major Issue
Greedily, of course, this plant-cloning method is a great way for us to get our hands on some ultra-rare varieties of plants without paying through the nose for them.
Even better than this, though, is the fact that it does what lab-grown diamonds did for mined diamonds: they offer a cheaper, more ethical, and sustainable alternative – one that doesn't involve smugglers over-harvesting surprisingly endangered plant species.
As one ecologist and conservationist on YouTube puts it: “Not only is [tissue culture] able to lower prices of rare plants, it ALSO saturates the market for poached wild plants as well! [Tissue culture] is an act of conservation.”
The Ultimate Tissue Culture Starter Kit:
“Too many plants get stolen from their wild environment because of ‘rarity’ so mass cloning is infinitely preferrable to plant smugglers harvesting rare wild plants into extinction,” agrees another commenter.
And still one more notes: “If you [can crash] a market by growing plants, the market should have crashed long before you even arrived in this world.”
Suddenly, those tissue culture tutorial videos from Plants In Jars are looking more and more appealing, aren't they?
There's Just One Catch...
While plants aren't protected by copyright, new varieties are protected by different intellectual property laws, such as Plant Breeders' Rights (PBR) or patents, especially for genetically modified or distinct new types.
This means that, while you absolutely can use this plant-cloning method to get your hands on ultra rare varieties, you should take care not to sell any cuttings without permission. These plants should be created for love, not cold hard cash.
And take care, too, to do your research: these are laboratory-grade substances designed for scientific use, so safety guidelines are a must-read.
Finally, take care to really think about what you're going to use your newfound skills to grow and propagate: with great power comes great responsibility, and all that.
After all, you don't want to accidentally create any invasive species that might cause problems for native plants – or, y'know, an Audrey II-type monster from The Little Shop of Horrors.
Happy cloning...
