rockm

I would suspect that "yatsubusa" black pine seeds are actually highly variable and probably won't produce the tight backbudding that yatsubusa types of plants produce. "Yatsubusa" roughly means "dwarf" and nothing more. The term covers a wide variety of cultivars that have short, tight growth. More often than not, those cultivars, especially the pine types, are grown from "witches brooms" on older plants. They are not propagated with seeds, but made from cuttings. The original cutting is cloned thousands of times to produce seedlings.

Just like specialized Japanese maple cultivars--or any other kind of genetically manipulated plant cultivar--the seeds will be high unreliable in reproducing the unique charateristics of the mother plant. In other words--don't count on getting a "Yatsubusa" variety from a seed produced by such a cultivar. The odds are overwhelmingly against you coming up with the exact same genetic variation as the parent.

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