Yeah, but you can't distribute clones of that one. Any children that one has can be distributed.
And Whimgrinder, you'd only have crippling inbreeding issues in animals. Plants are much, much more capable of handling that, and the few that are notably effected wouldn't be cloned from. All you need is just one that looks like the parent. In other plant communities, selfing them is actually a requirement for eight generations in order to say you have new strain.
Selfed plants will always create more recessive, deleterious alleles than crossed plants. The alleles vary in how they affect fitness and vital plant functions--cell division/differentiation, chlorophyll production, hormones, immune response, etc. There are certain plants that do tolerate selfing more than others (Mimulus, Drosera, etc.), but for most of the plant kingdom sexual reproduction is in the best interest of the plants.
If plants had immune systems, our lives as hobbyists would be so much easier! Also, this is off-topic from the point of the thread, but I was unsure if inbreeding affects Nepenthes detrimentally. Why would it not cause problems for them, but could still cause problems for other plants (man, plant genetics seems so much more complex than animal genetics).
Edit: ignore the part I said about Nepenthes inbreeding, I misread "aren't even capable of it".
I have to strongly disagree. Plants
abso-freaking-lutely have immune responses to a wide range of pests, diseases, and mechanical damage. This ranges the gamut from physiological defenses (spines, trichomes) to chemical defenses (nicotine, caffeine, menthol, allelopathy, resins, latex etc.). Plants even use volatile gases to communicate from leaf-to-leaf and plant-to-plant. In the case of idioblasts, some plants have cells whose sole role is to explode suicidally and release poisons. Some case studies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrrSAc-vjG4. Also, the very well-pieced-together process of how trees defend from fungal attacks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_of_decay_in_trees
I meant more along the lines of our complex immune systems. It would be wonderful if they could fight off fungus infections like we fight off the flu!
Also, I had not known that neps could change their sex like that, very interesting!
All plants are constantly in battle with the outside world, including microbes, nematodes, viruses, insects, and herbivores. This is why so many interesting and useful plant-derived chemicals have evolved. This includes carnivorous plants. In fact, the trichomes of Drosera were derived, evolutionarily, from trichomes that may have originally had a protective rather than carnivorous function for the plant.
One of the most important things that I have learned over the years is to understand the cultural reasons why pests and diseases succeed. Often, problems can be traced to factors like nutrition, pH, soil aeration, and other factors which limit the ability of the plant to fight problems. The better I can grasp
why I'm getting problems, the fewer pesticides I use. It's just often complicated to get it right, and there's a lot of room for error and making choices which don't get to the root of the problem.