Clone

So first of all, what is a clone? Well, the word clone, as we spell it in English, derives from an ancient Greek word, which is spelled differently, of course. Okay, but said more or less the same clone, right, which means a twig, a small branch of a tree. Okay, and the reason we get this word is because one way of propagating trees, as you probably know, growing new trees, is to take a twig from one old tree and graft it onto another tree. Okay, and when you do that, the mother tree, as it were, supplies the nutrient. And what grows out from the branch is not the same as the mother tree, but is the same as the tree that it was taken from. Okay, so what we are doing is reproducing the tree we took the twig from, but attaching it to another rootstock, as they call it. Okay, so we, this, this way we can produce lots of copies of our original tree by taking lots of little twigs and sticking them onto new roots. And so this word clone was originally used for a group of cultivated plants all from one stock, which had been produced by this method of grafting.