I’ve recently been watching the show ‘A Discovery of Witches’ (based on the ‘All Souls Trilogy’ by Deborah Harkness) and in the third series the word ‘scion’ is used to describe a magical being born from unions (by which I mean sexy sex, tee hee) between witches, vampires, daemons and humans.
Scion also has a couple of rather more mundane definitions in the real world. The first one is a figurative one – it’s used to refer to a descendant, heir or offspring, especially in the context of a family or lineage. Usually a posh family or lineage. If you move in those types of circles then you might have heard the phrase ‘scion of a wealthy family’. Lucky you.
How do you like them apples?
The second explanation is a botanical one. In this context a scion refers to a shoot or twig that’s cut off and then grafted onto another plant. This all sounds a bit Frankenstein to me as a non-gardener (although I did grow two whole lettuces this summer), and allows horticulturists to combine the nice bits of two different plants into one. For example, they might graft a scion from a tree with yummers fruit onto a rootstock which has good disease resistance, or likes a certain type of soil (more on that in a minute).
‘Scion’ has its roots (geddit?) in Middle English and was borrowed from Anglo-French, which itself originated from continental Old French. The French term ‘cion’ meant ‘offspring’ or ‘new growth of a plant’, and came from a combination of a West Germanic root (again, sorry) meaning ‘sprout’ or ‘bud’. The horticultural meaning came first (in the 14th century), and the posh family meaning probably followed due to the metaphorical idea of a new growth or offshoot representing the continuation of a family or lineage.
Grafting scions is used for most commercially successful apples, because it’s basically impossible to grow a particular type of apple tree from a seed. So if you’re eating a Granny Smith and plant one of the seeds, you won’t get a Granny Smith tree. That’s because apple seeds are a result of sexual reproduction (tee hee again), meaning they inherit genetic material from both the mother tree (the apple variety you’ve just eaten) and a pollen source (which has to be a different apple tree). Apple trees also take bloody ages to grow. That makes grafting a scion from a mature, known tree onto a rootstock much quicker and more reliable, as it means the new tree will be genetically identical to the parent and have the same characteristics. So basically all the apples we eat are CLONES. Mind blown.