From Stem or Seed, a New Plant Is Born

Even though I’ve lived in my home for only five years, some of the plants I’m growing here have been with me for decades, moving from garden to garden as cuttings.

Cuttings are one way plants are propagated vegetatively, that is, a piece of the plant, not a seed, begets a new plant. It is quite amazing when you think about it, because many of the plants we grow are all pieces of the same plant. They could, in fact, be considered--collectively--one plant.

If you have a Pittosporum Wheeler’s Dwarf in your garden, it is the very same Wheeler’s Dwarf that’s growing in my garden, and the very same plant growing in hundreds of gardens.

Vegetative propagation also means that a plant you are growing may be the very same plant grown centuries earlier, because vegetative propagation is a form of plant immortality. The original plant may be long gone, but its bits and pieces survive.

Such plants are often “cultivars,” short for “cultivated varieties.” Cultivars are always propagated vegetatively, because it is the only way to preserve whatever trait has made them different from the species.

A species is a plant found growing in the wild, while a cultivar is usually discovered growing in a garden, under cultivation.

Wheeler’s Dwarf is a cultivar, a much smaller and more compact form of Pittosporum tobira , which is the species. It was discovered in an Australian garden, as I recall. It can be grown only from cuttings. Try it from seed, and its compactness is not guaranteed.

Cultivars are usually given descriptive names--like Wheeler’s Dwarf--and each name usually is surrounded by single quotes, though it may simply be capitalized (as it is in this article). The species is always shown in italics.

Plants grown from seed are also given names if they are different enough from their wild ancestors, but these are not put in single quotes. Named plants raised from seed may be very much like their wild relatives.

A good example is the seed strain of delphiniums named Blue Fountains, the most popular delphinium. They come in a great variety of sizes, shapes and colors. Compare these to the cutting-grown named varieties in England, where each plant is identical to its parent.

Hybrids are seed-grown plants that are remarkably alike because of the way the seed is produced. A given pair of parents always will produce the same progeny, so all Inca marigolds are nearly identical.

Hybrids are so alike, their names are often put inside single quotes just like cultivars. In a seed catalogue, the word hybrid is usually part of the name: Inca is listed as Inca Hybrid.

If you are looking at rows of identical bedding plants, chances are they are hybrids, though some seed strains are remarkably uniform; with a strain, however, there is no guarantee as there is with hybrids.

Incidentally, there is no point saving the seeds of hybrids, if they make any, because that guarantee of alikeness only works for the first generation.

While most of us have grown something from seed (and remember that this is the perfect time to start seeds because they need warmth to germinate and those started now will be ready for fall planting), cuttings are tried only on a few dependable plants, such as impatiens, geraniums and most succulents.

But cuttings are one of the easiest, quickest and most dependable ways to propagate plants. The easiest way is in a plastic bag partially filled with vermiculite or Sponge Rok. It works like a little greenhouse.

The best way is under mist. The mist keeps the plants from drying out while they make roots but doesn’t keep them so moist that they rot, which can happen in plastic bags.

My first try at mist propagation of cuttings was so successful that I found myself the recipient of all sorts of cuttings from others who wanted them propagated.

I soon had a miniature nursery going in the side yard, which ended up benefiting a society’s plant sale because there wasn’t enough room in my garden to plant this bounty.

Even good gardeners were amazed at my luck, and yet the system was so simple I was embarrassed to confess it. All I did was buy a little brass mist nozzle (the kind with only one pinhole opening) and put it on the end of a hose.

I tied the hose to a wooden stake so it was held just above the flats of cuttings and turned it on--barely--in the morning and off at night. Very little water comes out of the nozzle so I wasn’t using much, but the foliage was always moist.

I later added a timer that turned the nozzle on and off throughout the day, and added more mist nozzles so I could do a whole row of flats, but the principle remained the same: I kept the cuttings in filtered sun, in flats filled with coarse Sponge Rok, and the foliage never completely dried.

The filtered sun kept the cuttings from elongating from lack of light and helped prevent any mold or disease. The coarse Sponge Rok kept the “soil” from becoming soggy, because the water went right though it.

How do you make a cutting? I found that any 3 to 4 inches of tip growth rooted, as long as it wasn’t flowering or about to flower.

I didn’t use rooting hormones, but I made a final clean cut with a razor blade just below a leaf before inserting it in the Sponge Rok. Any leaves that would end up under the Sponge Rok were cut off, but all the rest were saved because the mist helped keep them alive and they helped keep the cutting strong.

Thanks to the ability to make cuttings, I have saved plants that would have been left behind in other gardens, have been able to grow things I got from others that aren’t at nurseries, and have even preserved one old rose that grew in my grandmother’s garden so it could enjoy another century of life.