[amanzed]

It's been said before, but even without drawing neo-Lamarckian heredity into the question, cultivation exerts additional pressures of inbreeding and selection bias: (for vegetative propagation) selection for clones which branch or offset readily, and (for any commercial propagation) selection for populations which grow profusely in cultivation (or simply grow well at all). Not to mention the nurture and propagation of traits which would never survive in the wild.

These selection pressures may quickly push a taxon in cultivation far away from its genetic and morphotypic "center", judged against populations in habitat.

Getting back to epigenetic factors, we hobbyists are so attracted by the "magic" of vegetative propagation that we often assume that cuttings are (more or less) new copies of the same plant (except for an absent caudex here and there) rather than thinking of them as fragments of very old plants. But I seem to recall from a recent news feed (pointed to here) that researchers found in one instance that very old clones had less success with sexual reproduction. This certainly got my attention and challenged my assumptions about the magic of vegetative reproduction!

--dean