Question

if a horticulturist breeding gardenias succeeds in having a single plant with a particularly desirable set of traits, which of the following would be her most probable and efficient route to establishing a line of such plants?

Answer 1

The answer is to clone a plant asexually.

Cloning occurs naturally in some plants. Plants can clone themselves by asexual reproduction and, thus, produce identical copies of themselves. In asexual reproduction, there only one parent is necessary. There is no gamete fusion, no mixing of genetic information, so the offspring is genetically identical. So, after a horticulturist succeeds in breeding gardenias and wants to keep its line, it should clone it asexually. That way a particularly desirable set of traits will pass to all offspring.