Tracing the roots of the seedless Clementine

How sweet Clementine is this time of year, looking so pretty nestled in small wooden crates. How nice that these tangerines have no seeds to interrupt bites into the juicy, sweet segments.

But hold on a second here! As a gardener, don't you wonder: Without seeds, how do you make a new Clementine tree? Or a seedless Navel tree? Or a tree of any other seedless fruit?

Clone after clone

You make a new tree of any seedless fruit the same way that you make a new tree of any other fruit, by cloning. If cloning sounds too eerie, then say "by grafting" or "by cuttings," friendlier terms for the particular methods of cloning used for most fruit trees.

Cloning is the way to create a new, genetically identical plant -- another McIntosh apple tree, another Concord grape vine, or another Clementine tangerine tree -- from existing plants.

Just take a piece of stem from any of these varieties and either graft it onto an existing plant or get the stem to form its own roots. The resulting plant -- or the part of it above the graft in the case of the grafted plant -- is then genetically identical to the original.

If, on the other hand, you were to plant a seed from any of the above fruits, the resulting plant would yield fruits unlike the fruit from which the seed was taken. What that fruit would be like would depend on how the particular combination of pollen and egg cells happened to jumble together in the seed you planted.

Chicken or egg, which came first?Œ

That answers the question of how you make new Clementine trees, but not how the very first Clementine came about.

The first McIntosh apple tree grew from a seed. Once the superior qualities of the fruit that this seedling bore were recognized, the tree was multiplied by grafting -- and given the name McIntosh.

The first Clementine tree likewise began life as a seed, planted about a century ago by Father Clement Rodier, in Algiers. The genes within this new seedling, by chance, had jumbled together into an evolutionary dead end -- a tree producing seedless fruits.

Not always seedless

Crunch. I just bit into a seed in this supposedly seedless Clementine. Yes, seeds do occasionally appear, the result of pollen from a different variety of tangerine making its way to a Clementine flower.

Clementine is seedless only if grown in isolation. Don't you be tempted to plant any of these seeds, though, because if the seedlings were to bear fruits, they would not, of course, be Clementines.