Well, it's certainly an interesting area for thought. I saw a show in the Discovery Channel a couple years ago about a large Holland farm (ing) on tulip breeding and growing. They never mentioned the name since it was more about modern day agriculture and global marketing; a massive, unbelieavible operation. But anyway, Laboratory functions played a big role in the program to emphasize the 'modern'. They demonstrated and illustrated tissue culture as a way to produce millions of bulbs of the same cultivar. They illustrated how they test tissue cultures for viruses, growing successive rapid cultures and checking them each time under a microscope until the samples were 'free' of virus. The term 'free' they qualified as 'undetectable' meaning it could no longer be detected under a microscope. But they further qualifed that by saying all it would take is one or two undetected virused cells in a sample and the whole batch of up to 20 million would eventually become virused again. So they then showed their cultivar batch retains they grow to monitor the quality of each batch shipped. I don't believe they said how many years they kept the sample retain plants.
The reason I dwell on this again now is, this Spring I was surprized to see that The Lily Nook up in Manatoba offered an old de Graaff cultivar, Anaconda, as a clone. Well, I already have a fine example of it, but since this was a clone, I bought a couple for pollenating and seeding. Then, I got to thinking, maybe this clone, the product of so many successive clones over the last 60 years, might be carrying one or more viruses--maybe a virus I don't have here. So I'm contemplating whether or not to plant it in quarentene and use it from there.
