Page:Enquiry into plants (Volume 1).pdf/139



I. ways in which trees and plants in general originate are these:—spontaneous growth, growth from seed, from a root, from a piece torn off, from a branch or twig, from the trunk itself; or again from small pieces into which the wood is cut up (for some trees can be produced even in this manner). Of these methods spontaneous growth comes first, one may say, but growth from seed or root would seem most natural; indeed these methods too may be called spontaneous; wherefore they are found even in wild kinds, while the remaining methods depend on human skill or at least on human choice.

However all plants start in one or other of these ways, and most of them in more than one. Thus the olive is grown in all the ways mentioned, except from a twig for an olive-twig will not grow if it is set in the ground, as a fig or pomegranate will grow from their young shoots. Not but what some say that cases have been known in which, when a stake of olive-wood was planted to support ivy, it actually lived along with it and became a tree; but such an instance is a rare exception, while the other methods of growth are in most cases the natural ones. The fig grows in all the ways mentioned,

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