B. Papp szerk.: Studia Botanica Hungarica 29. 1998 (Budapest, 1999)

Debreczy, Zsolt; Rácz, István: The prostrate form of the Phoenician juniper: Juniperus phoenicea L. f. prostrata, f. nov.

Another approach is that the strong winds caused the establishment of the prostrate habit and initiated the rooting habit as a secondary characteristic in the development of this form. This argument cannot be supported because of the observation that other low stands of the Phoenician juniper appear to be dwarfed, but they do not have low adventitious rooting bodies. Long observation of the Phoenician juniper indicates that the species typically has little capacity to develop adventitious roots and it does not root easily in artificial circumstances. If the first statement is true, the genetic prints of this likely phenotypic character must be present in the creeping genotype, making it quite likely that viable prostrate seedlings will appear in a large and subsequently repeated selection in seedbeds from seeds collected from prostrate plant(s). Fig. 4. Detail of one of the type sheets of the prostrate Phoenician juniper with arrows pointing to the rooted side branches (scale bar: 10 cm).