Propagagation: Making More Of A Good Thing

Having a green thumb may have something to do with heredity, and there’s little doubt that mine came from my father’s side of the family. However, I do have one other person to thank who had a very early impression on my horticultural endeavors. It was my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Attanis.

I attended grade school in a large, old, classic brick public school and my fourth grade classroom had a huge bay-type window that must have been 15 feet long and a dozen feet high. Mrs. Attanis took advantage of this by growing plants. To this day I remember the image of row after row of coleus plants and her tending to them each and every day. With so many plants it became a bit of a problem when vacations came around, but she managed to have certain students adopt several plants that they would take home and care for when there were school breaks.

When summer vacation was a month or so away, she began to take cuttings of her coleus, and the cuttings were placed in water-filled Coke bottles (small ones), where they would root. On the last day of class each year, every student would get a Coke bottle filled with water and a well-rooted coleus plant as a memory of the year gone by.

Mrs. Attanis took a special liking to me, though, the shy kid who sat in the back of the class, and she took it upon herself to teach me how to take the cuttings, or “slips” as she called them, and get them to root. And at the end of the school year I didn’t get a Coke bottle coleus. No, for me there was something special. She’d taken 3-inch cuttings of all of her favorite coleus and gave them to me wrapped in damp newspaper with the instruction to take them home, root them and start my own garden.

So, at the ripe old age of 9, I learned the art of propagation from Mrs. Attanis, which most undoubtedly planted the seed that led me to learn the science of propagation a dozen years later. It’s something you should learn as well, either as an art or science or both. It can be incredibly easy and rewarding, and for a gardener learning how to propagate, pays incredible dividends with little investment.

Let’s say you’re at a friend’s house or on a garden tour and as you’re walking through the garden your eye is caught by the most magnificent plant you’ve ever seen. The colors are unlike any combination you can recall and the sword=like foliage is completely unfamiliar. You’ve got to have one of these for next year’s garden, but no one knows where it came from let alone its name. There’s also that wonderful hibiscus you saw in another garden, and while you know it’s a hardy perennial you’ve never seen the pink flowers with red striations and faint stripes and blotches. How in the world can you find out where to get one of these?

Or maybe you’re walking down the beach and just on the water side of the dunes you notice a wonderful gray foliage plant with tiny yellow flowers that makes a wonderful groundcover in the sand. That’s right—it’s growing in pure sand. You get home and search your books on seashore plants to find that it’s beach wormwood (Artemisia stelleriana), but only one mail order nursery out in New Mexico is offering it, and their website says “not available.” What’s a gardener to do? Propagate!

The process is called asexual propagation (as opposed to sexual propagation, where seed is produced) and in the case of all of the above examples and hundreds of others the method is to take what we call soft wood cuttings, strike them in a medium, get them to root and almost like magic you have an identical replication of the plant you want. Yes, it’s the most basic and rudimentary way of cloning, and man’s been doing it for centuries. Better yet, you can do it at home at little cost, and as your experience level increases you’ll find yourself taking cuttings and growing plants you never dreamed you would. But start simple and learn the rules (and tricks).

First though, some legal issues. If you look at the tags that come with many plants there is a line that says “asexual propagation prohibited.” What this means is that the breeder of that plant has a patent on it and retains the propagation rights. But it’s pretty well accepted that you as the consumer have the right to reproduce the plant for your own personal use. That means if you take a cutting you won’t go to jail. But if you take a lot of cuttings and sell them then you’ve certainly broken the law.

The cuttings that beginners should seek are generally from annuals and some perennials (though many perennials can be propagated by division) that for various reasons can’t be grown from seed. The cuttings of the annuals need to be taken while the plant is vigorously growing (now) and before cold weather has signaled that it’s time to close down for the season. In addition, the plant should not be flowering, or at least the shoot that you’re cutting from should not be flowering. When most plants flower and start to set seed they become more difficult to root. Cuttings from perennials need to be taken early in the season before the stems begin to turn woody, which is why we call the cuttings “softwood,” and also before flowering begins.

Cuttings are usually taken from the apex or growing tip of the plant. As a rule, the cutting should be 2 to 3 inches long with at least three leaves. If side shoot cuttings are taken there’s a good chance that the plant from the cutting you’re taking will always grow sideways and while this works for plants in hanging baskets it usually doesn’t work well for plants going into the garden. Remember that plants like coleus are genetically primed to complete their life cycle in one year or less because they are annuals, so you eventually may have to take cuttings of your cuttings in order to have the plants you want for next year’s garden.

Cloudy humid days are perfect for taking cuttings as they will remain turgid and this is critical for success. Wilted cuttings rarely recover and easily rot. Cuttings can also be taken very early in the morning before the sun hits the plant or at dusk, but never during the day. Have your propagation set up ready to receive your cuttings as soon as you cut them, although a few plants such as geraniums can go for several hours before you strike them. (Striking is the act of putting the cutting into the rooting medium.)

Next week: the easy steps to rooting softwood cuttings, a few plants that nearly propagate themselves, and moving on to the more difficult propagation of woody plants and shrubs. In the meantime, if you want to get a jump on things take a look here http://goo.gl/WZQNVl. Keep growing.