three-berry

Shortly after they settled their mountain lake the women's ancestors discovered a parasitic plant in the surrounding forest. The plant grew in the treetops and bore a juicy red berry that cautious experiments showed was not poisonous. They collected the fruit wherever they could find it, and it became an important part of their diet.

Basic Information

Genetics and Reproduction

In the wild, three-berry propagates through birds that eat its fruit. The droppings hold the seeds in place long enough for them to get roots into the host tree.

Additional Information

Domestication

Many years after the plant was first discovered, the women found a mutated specimen in which the berry, instead of being a single fruit, was three fruits merged into one. The triple berry also had a milder taste. Berry gatherers tried to deliberately start the seeds in other host trees, but without the natural glue of bird droppings the seeds weren't able to take hold.
Next they tried cutting pieces of the plant's stem and splicing it into the stems of normal berry plants. This was more successful, resulting in several clumps of single and triple berries intermixed. The next generation saw cross-pollination between the normal and mutated berry, resulting in a three-berry fruit with the stronger flavor of the single berry. Using the same grafting technique, they spread the hybrid Later on they developed a method of cutting notches into the bark to keep seeds from falling out of the tree
After the success of cultivating the three-berry fruit, women kept an eye out for other unusual varieties of the plant. At present they grow more than twenty cultivars, among them a yellow-leafed subspecies valued for medicinal purposes, and another with pale fruits containing more starch than sugar.

View from the Future

12,000 years, The Ocean
Three-berry, along with other tree-hosted crops, is still cultivated on the vastland. Attempts to grow such plants on atolls failed--the ocean climate isn't favorable, and palm trees do not as readily accept the grafts. Islanders view arboreal agriculture as primitive, even though they themselves raise orchard fruit.