sometimes formed instead of the flowers of garlic. Mechanisms Meristem tissue makes the process of asexual reproduction possible. It is normally found in stems, leaves, and tips of stems and roots and consists of undifferentiated cells that are constantly dividing allowing for plant growth and give rise to plant tissue systems. The meristem tissue's ability to continuously divide allows for vegetative propagation to occur. Another important ability that allows for vegetative propagation is the ability to develop adventitious roots which arise from other vegetative parts of the plants such as the stem or leaves. These roots allow for the development of new plants from body parts from other plants. Advantages and disadvantages Advantages There are several advantages of vegetative reproduction, mainly that the produced offspring are clones of their parent plants. If a plant has favorable traits, it can continue to pass down its advantageous genetic information to its offspring. It can be economically beneficial for commercial growers to clone a certain plant to ensure consistency throughout their crops. Vegetative propagation also allows plants to avoid the costly and complex process of producing sexual reproduction organs such as flowers and the subsequent seeds and fruits. For example, developing an ace cultivar is extremely difficult, so, once farmers develop the desired traits in lily, they use grafting and budding to ensure the consistency of the new cultivar and its successful production on a commercial level. However, as can be seen in many variegated plants, this does not always apply, because many plants actually are chimeras and cuttings might reflect the attributes of only one or some of the parent cell lines. Vegetative propagation also allows plants to circumvent the immature seedling phase and reach the mature phase faster. In nature, that increases the chances for a plant to successfully reach maturity, and, commercially, it saves farmers a lot of time and money as it allows for faster crop overturn. Vegetative reproduction offers research advantages in several areas of biology and has practical usage when it comes to afforestation. The most common use made of vegetative propagation by forest geneticists and tree breeders has been to move genes from selected trees to some convenient location, usually designated a gene bank, clone bank, clone-holding orchard, or seed orchard where their genes can be recombined in pedigreed offspring. Some analyses suggest that vegetative reproduction is a characteristic which makes a plant species more likely