"David WE Roberts" wrote in message
...
In my back garden the 'soldiers' grown from last year's fallen tomatoes
are starting to ripen fruit.

From this I presume that they in turn could drop fruit to provide seed for
next year.

So what is there to stop tomatoes becoming naturalised in the UK?
I assume that the current climate is conducive to outdoor tomatoes and the
last winter was certainly pretty harsh.

Although I haven't seen tomatoes growing as weeds in mediteranean areas.


Hmmm....the definition of indigenous from Wikipedia is interesting.

"In biogeography, a species is defined as native to a given region or
ecosystem if its presence in that region is the result of only natural
processes, with no human intervention. Every natural organism (as opposed to
a domesticated organism) has its own natural range of distribution in which
it is regarded as native. Outside this native range, a species may be
introduced by human activity; it is then referred to as an introduced
species within the regions where it was anthropogenically introduced.

An indigenous species is not necessarily endemic. In biology and ecology,
endemic means exclusively native to the biota of a specific place. An
indigenous species may occur in areas other than the one under
consideration.

The terms endemic and indigenous do not imply that an organism necessarily
originated or evolved where it is found."

So if this is correct, to be indigenous the tomato would have to have
arrived by natural means which kind of answers my original question - not
that it was quite what I meant.
Unless of course there are migratory birds which carry tomato seeds in their
gut and deposit them here.

So I was obviously wondering why it wasn't growing wild without direct human
assistance.
Apparently it is.

Thanks for the interesting discussion :-)

--
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
[Not even bunny]

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

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