Encyclopedia of forest sciences

Vegetative regeneration is both a natural process and an artificial process (Leakey, 1985). The artificial process is used by agriculturalists, horticulturalists and foresters, to capture and multiply individual genotypes, and so to produce cultivars and clones (Mudge and Brennan, 1999), with clonal forestry in China having a history going back 800 years (Minghe and Ritchie, 1999a). Typically the process is used to develop superior planting stock, although there are also many applications in research, where clonal uniformity is a powerful tool in the separation and identification of physiological and other growth processes in plants (Longman et al., 1980).