system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
We've cloned sheep. We've cloned a lot of mice. Some folks want to clone mammoths. How hard is it to clone a tree?

I was reading recently about a species of mahogany that yielded the finest furniture ever made--so fine, in fact, that it went extinct from over-use. With all the recent talk about resurrecting the mammoth, it struck me that bringing back a species of tree, a much simpler organism which has many close extant relatives and a large amount of genetic material available (largely in the form of chairs) seems like it'd be relatively easy. Are there any impediments to cloning plants the way we'd clone animals?

EDIT:

I realize that it's very easy to clone plants by their own mechanisms, and that that's how many food crops are grown. Obviously, this wouldn't work with long-dead wood.
gpt
Plants are easy to clone. You just take a cutting of it, shove it in the ground, and boom, clone. Cloning from straight DNA in plants is vastly harder.

Plants are NOT simple organisms, no matter how boring they look. They are just as complex as humans in just about every metric you pick - genome size, number of genes, specialization of cells, etc. In fact, plants can have extremely complex and confusing genetic makeups - redwoods, for instance, have 6 sets of chromosomes, compared to our two.

Further, molecular biology with plants is incredibly difficult. Aside from having complicated genomes, they have big thick cell walls that make a lot of standard techniques difficult. Cloning in animal cells is done by ripping the nucleus out of an egg, and adding the nucleus from a target cell. The very tiny surgery required to do this is a lot harder when you have to deal with a rigid layer of cellulose.

The only reason we've made more progress in genetically engineering plants is because nobody cares if you kill them. Kill one measly human and everyone's all human rights this and mad scientist that.