I have 0 formal education on the topic or anything related to it, but I was just hoping to get the discussion going, get some more educated people to explain things.
Essentially: DNA can change after birth. Trauma or other experiences can change or even add DNA. Is it possible this explains variation in clones that are supposedly the same but display wildly different traits, or when an old cut “just isn’t like it was 20 years ago”?
Also: does stressing a parent plant make it a worse parent? These changes can be passed to offspring. So, in theory, a stressed plant would put out different(worse?) progeny from a clone of itself that had never been stressed