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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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.