Our man Vergil seems uncommonly fixated on arboreal reproduction!  Let's be clear about what's going on:

Natural Reproduction
1.  Plants that grow spontaneously. 
V. cites 4 examples.  Two are described as growing in fields.  These are both low-growing, flowering shrubs.
siler  Well, lots of debate about this one!  I'll go with Parker's identification of this as , known in English as staveacre, lice bane, or lousewort. It was said to have been a cure for the very unpleasant disease phthiriasis [φθειρίασις < φθείρ ‘louse’]), a condition in which lice lay their eggs between the eyelashes.  Sulla is said to have suffered from this disease.

Delphinium staphisagria

sparteum iunceum

 genista-- Spanish broom, Sparteum iunceum.







Two are described as living by rivers.  These are both tall trees, familiar to us from the Eclogues:  the poplar (populus) and the willow (salicta).  Whether deliberately or not,  Vergil is telling an untruth here, as these plants come from seeds rather than from spontaneous generation.


2.  Plants that grow from seeds.  Vergil gives two examples here, the chestnut (castanea) and the oak (aesculus), the tree that grows in the groves of Jupiter and that the Greeks believed was oracular (oracle at Dodona).  The nuts of both trees are elements of the Golden Age/ primitive diet.

3. Plants that grow from shoots that grow up from the mother trunk:  V. cites the (sour) cherry (cerasa), the bay laurel (Laurus), and the elm (ulmus). 

Agricultural methods of propagation requiring human labor:
1.  Rooting cuttings from the mother plant-- Vergil's language here is surprisingly violent--
hic plantas tenero abscindens de corpore matrum/ deposuit sulcis, cutting the shoots from the mothers' tender bodies, he placed them in furrows.

2. Tip-layering!
That is what these difficult to understand lines are about:
silvarumque aliae pressos propagine arcus
exspectant et viva sua plantaria terra:











 3.  Grafting-- here is a video about grafting We did not read all of the section on grafting, but note that of the 6 grafts Vergil proposes, 2 are possible (i.e., mightproduce fruit) and 4 are impossible.  For a graft to be successful, the stock and scion must be of the same family.  According to Thomas, even the two that are possible are unlikely; grafts are generally between species of the same genus.

Possible:  apple on pear tree (33)
Impossible:  cornel on plum (34)
Impossible:  walnut on arbutus 69
Impossible: plane and apple (70)
Impossible: pear and elm (71-2)
Possible (perhaps); chestnut and beech (71)
 Thomas notes that Vergil "did realize the impossibility of his choices, for he places such grafts in the area of the marvel (thauma) when in Ecl. 8.53-53, in a series of adynata, he writes: nunc ut ovis ultro fugiat lupus, aurea durae/ mala ferant quercus, narcisso floreat alnus."

Again, Thomas:  "The discussion of impracticable or impossible grafts constitutes the first of a number of deliberate falsehoods in Georgics 2...the ultimate effect of these falsehoods is to pose certain questions about the 'success' which is generally perceived in this book."