This video suggests that some of the adaptations that help plants survive drought also help them survive cold, and vice versa.
(It’s short: about two and a half minutes long.)
If that’s accurate, that makes me wonder . . . are drought tolerant tropical trees more likely to be able to adapt to colder temperatures? Would the odds of, say, moringa figuring out how to survive a temperate climate be any higher than the odds of, say, a mamey apple? (Mammea americana.)
If so, for those of us eager to push the zone and breed new generations that can handle colder and colder temperatures, maybe drought tolerant species will be easier to do that with, even for places with average or higher than average precipitation.
Interesting. I have seen survival techniques that seem to work in both directions, but mostly with various weeds.
I have seen wild lettuce, for example, with dew on its leaves when everything around it is icy. Same in deep summer, the dew seems to collect on the wild lettuce leaves when everything around it is bone dry. I have no idea of the cause, but apparently somehow the structure of the plant maintains a more even temperature. Because of its sap? Same “antifreeze” process? I don’t know.
I think primarily what you’re looking for is processes that help the plant respond to stress. Similar to the way a human might respond to a nedical emergency or job loss–different situations, but if they’ve built the habits of responding to syress, they’ll handle both.
(Nods.) Yeah, Carol Deppe mentioned in Grow Your Own Vegetable Varieties that heat tolerance, cold tolerance, and drought tolerance all seem to be correlated, and she speculated that meant they all sprang from the same trait, which was resilience in difficult situations. If so, neato, because of course I’d like more of all three traits with everything.
