I'm not sure what tissue culture is?! Could you explain? :-)

the only thing i know about palm tissue culture is that its very expensive. and only used for large crop palms like Dates, cocos and oil palms where its necessary to have a consistent crop without variation.

@richard- tissue culture is where you take a piece of a plant usually a stem or leaf and place it into a mix of hormones which causes the pieces to grow into a complete, new and identical plant.

Really?! that sounds very cool! I'd love to try that, but, it doesn't seem practical.... at least for me.

The most basic form of tissue culture is cuttings. From there you can go right up to culturing pieces of meristem under sterile conditions in a laboratory. The main thing is you produce identical plants that are already adults - clones. However, cuttings from palms doesn't work well.

Hello,
Thank you for the replies. I was thinking along the lines of propagating Trachycarpus and other cold hard palms in order to provide stock for breeding greater hardiness. This has been working wonders for banana (way easier to tissue culture than palms). There are plenty of super hardy banana varieties around now and a lot of that has to do with the ability to rapidly multiply particularly cold tolerant varieties and make them readily available, which allows other growers to cross varieties and experiment in a lot of different places and produce good seedlings from good parents. Palms are difficult to propagate clonally so if there happens to be one plant that is spectacularly hardy it really isn't available to anyone else to try their hand at growing it. Bananas happen to have a significantly shorter life cycle and are easy to propogate so it is no surprise that new varieties are always appearing. Would be nice to do the same with palms.

Ericthehurdler is right about cost. Many plants that are difficult to tissue culture are coaxed into propagation through somatic embryogenesis which is the tricking of plant tissue into forming embryos. Certain portions of the reproductive tissue of a plant are fairly responsive to this method. This method would likely require many transfers between different media and would take 2 years or more to go from a sample of plant tissue to a whole new plant in a pot, but the upside is you could make lots of identical plants in that period of time.
Cheers,
Werner