Is new plant breeding creating cheap plants that don't last?

Humans have been breeding and selecting plants for millennia. And this ongoing endeavour has produced some truly extraordinary outcomes. One of the most dramatic being the progeny of Brassica oleracea. This single weedy looking coastal plant from the Mediterranean (it looks like oil seed rape) has been bred and developed so extensively that it has spawned numerous offspring including broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, romanesco and kale.

That’s right, all our key brassicas are essentially just one plant developed into different shapes and forms through decades of selection and crossing. The driver behind this is of course food production and the development of palatable, (well if you exclude kale!) nutrient-rich vegetables. But what drives ornamental plant breeders and why do they continue to hybridise and develop new cultivars? It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that it’s all about the bottom line, AKA profit, but I believe a whole load of additional factors are behind the drive to create new plants.

Historically, much ornamental plant breeding was driven by curiosity, experimentation and novelty. Back in the 1930s, a nurseryman tried hybridising two conifers to create what is known as a bigeneric hybrid, in other words a plant with near equal proportions of both its parents’ genes. The outcome was a very fast-growing evergreen conifer that could be neatly clipped as a hedge. It took the public a while to embrace this new conifer but by the 1970s x Cuprocyparis leylandii (the Leyland cypress or leylandii) was outselling all other conifers combined. And, as we now know, this new wonder plant didn’t turn out quite as expected!

Today, a whole range of factors drive ornamental plant breeding.