My kids grew up calling broccoli flowerlets “trees.” As I recall, someone had made a “landscape” themed vegi tray, and used them as trees in the landscape.
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A cookbook with such a charming cover I almost bought it many times.
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Cultivars are the plant equivalent to “breeds”. Cabbage, collards, kale, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, broccoli, cauliflower, broccolini, and similar plants are all the same species, but selectively bred for different things (big leaves, flavor, lots of flower heads, etc.).
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This is a more scientific conclusion than some that I’ve heard:
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Based on today, if anyone asks me “What did your first job teach you?”, depending on the questioner, I either definitely will or definitely will not include “Forcing open rat ribcages is harder than I would have guessed.”
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I didn’t get the joke the cartoon was trying to make. Can somebody explain the joke to me? Having the joke explained ruins the humor, yes. But I’m curious.
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So, all of these different vegetables were products of selective breeding from the same ancestor. Which was really surprising to me when I first learned that, because we think of them as totally different things now. So xkcd is joking about how many other (very different) plants could be surreptitiously added to that list before people start getting suspicious.
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Such a great word. That is all. 
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In botany class it was at the very bottom of the classification system, below “variety” even: back then it was Kingdom, Phyllum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, Variety, Cultivar (remembered as “King Philip came over from Germany seeking vengeance cruelly”). Many domesticated plants fall into the “cultivar” category; indeed the name comes from the same root as “cultivated”.
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We actually took some very dried-out broccoli once and made a grove for our electric train layout.
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But being repetitious would cancel being surreptitious.
Which makes me wonder: is “titious” a root to which “repe” and “surrep” are added prefixes?
Well, duh – just look at them. 
Or may -titious is just a meaningless suffix, its only purpose being to make them adjectival. 
Is there any relationship to the play “Tish” I wonder (my sister played the lead in high school ; - ). And then there is subreptitious.
Must have been HO scale.
And the one that comes before Christmas, which would be Adventitious.
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Which was advantageous to humankind!
Can’t play that game with ChatGPT, and probably not Bard either, I suspect. Though you certainly could in the early days.
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