How plants make more plants
A plant cannot go looking for a mate. Everything it does to increase its own kind, it does standing still — and that constraint shapes both of the ways it reproduces.
Plants multiply their kind in two main ways:
- Asexual reproduction
- Sexual reproduction
Where each one is going
The asexual route is vegetative propagation, and it occupies the next two sections — the propagation a plant manages by itself, and the propagation we do to it.
The sexual route runs through the flower, and from there through pollination, fertilisation, fruit, seed, dispersal and germination. It takes up most of this chapter.
The distinction is worth holding onto, because a great many plants do both, and a gardener chooses between them deliberately.