Cutting vs Seed-grown Adenium

I do not agree with a universal statement that cutting and seed-grown adeniums are dramatically different. It depends on the species and the growing conditions. I label all of my plants because I usually cannot distinguish among them after several years. (And perfect grafts are also undetectable in time.) I have attached images of several of my plants below. See if you can tell which are seedlings and which are cuttings BEFORE you look at the answers at the bottom of the page.

The easiest species in which to distinguish cuttings from seedlings are the ones with the most dramatic caudexes - Adenium arabicum and socotranum. But there are exceptions among these too. I have some cuttings of arabicum that, at 4 years of age, are developing beautiful tall-conical caudexes. (I wanted to propagate it because the clone is everblooming. ) The parent has a squat caudex. I suspect that I will not be able to tell that they are cuttings in a few more years. I have a 7 year old cutting of socotranum that is now indistinguishable from the parent plant when it was the same age (the parent was a rather skinny specimen though). Adenium somalense grows very fast, and cuttings from my plants look just like their parents in about 5 years, only smaller of course.

The bottom line:
1. Cuttings of adeniums will often grow true to the parental form, but they usually take a few years longer than seedlings to develop a respectable caudex. In some cases cuttings develop a mass of thick roots instead of a proper caudex and thus remain more or less distinguishable (but some seedlings do the same thing). In other cases the caudex will be of a different shape than the parent's.
2. The main reason for growing from cuttings (aside from the aesthetic bias against grafts that some people have) is that it is much less labor intensive than grafting. However, some clones are very difficult to root.

Mark Dimmit