It was learnt in simple terms at the botanical garden that plants can be cloned in several ways. Cloning is now considered to be an efficient means to grow plants in being the result of vegetative propagation while seeds are the result of the natural reproductive phenomenon of plants. Basically, cloning entails taking a small branch cutting of a plant and putting it into a specific medium so that it forms its own roots by the process of rooting hormones.
Nature has been cloning plants for billions of years and in the modern world scientists have started to clone plants by using parts of specialized roots, breaking them into root cells and then growing them in a specific culture that is nutrient rich. In such cultures the cells which were initially specialized, become unspecialized by converting into calluses. These calluses are subsequently stimulated with the relevant hormones of plants to develop into fresh new plants which prove to be identical to the plant from which the pieces of roots were taken for such cloning. Such tissue culture is initiated from a very small section of the plant tissue and this process produces plants which are exact copies or clones of each other.
Although cloning is important in producing hundreds and thousands of clones of a single plant, tissue culture enables other options in propagating plants. In effect the tissue culture laboratories in the botanical garden facilitates the research of new procedures of reproducing plants that may prove to be rare and such information can be further used to conserve plants.
When seeds are planted, the outcome of the plant is more of guess work but clones can be taken from the best suited plants and their replica produced thus turning them into being genetically the same as their parent plants. This way the garden can comprise of the healthiest plants that are pest resistant, disease resistant and most productive. In fact the desired qualities in a plant can be brought about with cloning.
Plants which are grown by planting seeds can often prove to be unproductive since between thirty and sixty percent of seeds do not represent the best characteristics of their breed. Seeds also take time to grow while cloning starts with a plant that already exists, and all that is required is to add the hormones to the roots and to maintain the plant. Once the healthy plants are cloned and new branches begin to appear, they too can be further cloned and one can go on with this process of producing plants until the desired numbers are achieved.
It is known that many species of plants are now threatened with extinction because of their widespread selling for commercial purposes. In this context commercial laboratories use the research results of botanical gardens to produce several hundreds and thousands of similar plants thus reducing the burden on wild and natural plant populations. Cloning enables the production of a large number of plants in a short time as compared to traditional procedures of planting seeds and other measures such as divisions and cuttings.
Cloning helps a great deal in the conservation of plants because botanical gardens share their research results with plant nurseries which in turn use such results to produce large numbers of native plants by using the given tissue cultures. Usually botanical gardens, after having done the cloning exercise with rare plants, plant them back in their natural habitats, thus providing for adequate natural environment of such plants.