Senescence Simplified
“If you want to grow great plants
you need an environment tailored
to where your plants evolved to
grow indigenously.”
In reality, these two variables are often
difficult to quantify and are the result
of hundreds if not thousands of discrete
events, the products themselves of countless independent yet often cascading
chemical reactions. As entertaining and
informative as a brief dissertation on the
hormone/enzyme interplay responsible
for guiding, inducing and regulating plant
senescence might be to some, the content
of such a discourse would likely plunge
you into a boredom-induced stupor that
I can’t be certain you would ever recover
from. Gardening is supposed to be fun,
after all, so I will refrain from addressing
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Maximum Yield USA | March 2012
this topic from a biochemical position. I
will attempt something that is quite the
opposite—I will attempt to address plant
aging in a simple and uncomplicated
fashion. My hope is that if I approach
this complex topic casually, many readers who might have felt overwhelmed
by a dry article about ethylene, abscissic
and jasmonic acid, day length, root zone
temperatures and incident angles of solar
irradiation will continue to read along
and perhaps even come untraumatized
to a better understanding of the whole
complicated subject.