Question

Name the type of vegetative propagules in the following plants.
(a) Potato
(b) Ginger
(c) Bryophyllum

Answer 1

Vegetative propagation is a type of asexual reproduction, which is also called vegetative reproduction occurs in many plants, where a plant grows from any part or fragment of the parent plant, and this type of reproduction is seen both on land and aquatic plants.

Complete answer:
- Generally, plants reproduce by various methods, they may reproduce either asexual or sexual reproduction.
- In plants, asexual reproduction mainly occurs by the vegetative parts of the plants such as Stems, roots, leaflets that they can separate and divide and grows into new plants.
- There are various types of vegetative propagations such as Runners, Stolons, tubers, rhizomes, etc.
- This vegetative propagation not only occurs naturally, where they also can be induced by artificially.

(a) Potato: Potato is a stem tuber and the surface of this tuber, they have nodes which are also called eyes, this is the region where new one grows.
The new plant is growing from each eye or node of the potato and that growth is called sprouts.
So this potato can be propagated vegetatively by the whole tuber or a part of the tuber.

(b) Ginger: In ginger, vegetative propagation occurs through stems such as rhizome, where rhizome are the stems which grow horizontally under the ground, and this underground stem of ginger is swollen with food reserves, in this terminal bud grows upward to produce the new shoot, while lateral buds grow and separate to new plants.

(c) Bryophyllum: In this plant, vegetative reproduction occurs by the leaf buds present on the margins of the leaf, where the bud comes into contact with soil, each of them grows separate into a new plant.
So in simple terms, vegetative propagation of following plants such as potatoes by stem tubers, ginger by rhizome, and Bryophyllum by leaf buds.

Note: Vegetative propagation has both advantages as well as disadvantages, where the major advantage is cloning so that large numbers are produced and important genetic properties can be transferred to offspring, but the disadvantage is no genetic diversity and they can be attacked easily by plant pathogens.