I visited a vineyard whilst on holiday and brought back some grape seeds; I planted them and now have some healthy looking seedlings. When they grow into vines, will they have any fruit?
—This is an interesting question, usually answered inaccurately by celebrity gardeners. In the wild state, the vine is usually dioecious – it has separate male and female flowers, but hermaphrodite flowers are occasionally found, with stamens and ovary in the same flower. Practically all cultivated vines are hermaphrodite. To quote Edward Hyams: “If a population of wild vines, or cuttings from them, had been planted by some prehistoric gardener, he would have noticed that some vines bore no fruit at all,(males), some more much or little, unreliably (females), and some – the ones with the hermaphrodite flowers – always bore some fruit and could be regarded as reliable. The gardener, if a sensible man, would have chosen the first class for destruction and the third for propagation. But the males vines being destroyed, the females would receive less pollen than before and the crop from them would have fallen, showing up the hermaphrodite vines even more clearly as the most useful class.
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