[brunooo]

Can’t find the paper right now, but China has a massive effort underway to tissue culture needle trees for large areas in the West.

Single needle can basically be raised to dozens of seedlings in 3 months, and thus the only way they found to reach the scale they were looking for.

[CameronNemo]

Is there sex involved, or are they clones?

[_ph_]

This sounds like they are clones of the tree the needles were take from. But if the don't take a thousand needles from one tree but one needle from a thousand trees to star with, they would have a lot of generic variety. Going via needles would only mean "skipping" one generation of intermixing the genes, but the new trees would be as genetically varied as their origins.

[mythrwy]

Sex sex sex, that's all they think about.

(Clones if it's tissue culture)