Provenance Differences for Seedling Morphology and Growth of Cephalotaxus fortunei

Cephalotaxus fortunei provenance trails including 25 seed sources from 11 provinces,located at Mingxi of Fujian and Anji of Zhejiang,was used to study geographic variation of seed and seedling character(morphology and growth).The result of variance analysis indicated that there existed significant differences among provenances for seed and seedling morphology and growth.It was observed that the southeastern provenances possessed higher height growth rate with less branches and longer seeds,whereas the middle and western provenances possessed lower height growth rate with more branches and shorter seed.Cephalotaxus fortunei could be obviously divided into two types of long-leaf and short-leaf.The most provenances from the southeastern belong to the long-leaf type,while the most provenances from the middle and western belong to short-leaf type.The seed length,seedling height and branch quantity of long leaf type provenances were 116.8%、156.2% and 1.54% of short-leaf type ones.A classical latitude clinal variation pattern was found for seedling growth of long-leaf type provenances.Compared with the northern provenances,the southern ones had higher seedling growth rate.For the short-leaf provenances, there didn't existed a classical latitude clinal variation pattern for seedling growth,but the seedling diameter was positively related to the longitude of the seed source.