I love this time of year. The sap has stopped rising and is churning around in the stems, feeling a bit bored. Shrubs and woody plants are covered with soft fresh growth full of possibility and unfocussed ambitions. Everything has leaves and flowers out, which means that everything is displaying its identity brightly and proudly; and those with a touch of colour variation, a hint of variegation are twinkling like fairy lights in a June garden. It is time for softwood and stem cuttings.
One of the delights is that you never quite now what will gaily throw out roots at the first hint of moist soil and what will sulk, turn sad and die. But it's a twig. What's to lose?
Well, you do have to snip the top-growth, or essentially the plant will operate as a cut flower - attempt to make a flower and seed (this can also be magical - I found a discarded pelargonium stem in a heap of laurel leaf sweepings, flowering with zero root in soil, the other day, a bright pink flower poked up incongruously through the coppery dead leaves - it was a decent chunk of stem I'd knocked off the plant and it had just enough resources to throw up a flower). But here you are capitalising on the plant's ability to mend damage, along with its granular nature - each part of a plant is also a plant, and if it has nothing better to do, it will try and repair itself.
With the top-growth snipped and decent soil contact and just enough moisture, lots of plants happily shoot roots from the stem. Not everything (I have doubts about this one - waxy leaves don't like being cut) but a snapped off chrysanthemum stem following a round of vigorous cat romping in the garden has already produced five new plants this year. It's also, of course, a way to feel much better about the situation when you accidentally take the secateurs to the wrong thing; ah! A cutting!
Though both these are incomer plants; twigs sourced from shrubs in other places. That can work out very nicely; I have a stunning Black Elder, a sweetly fragrant Jasmine and a lovely Flowing Currant that started as twigs in jars (my "technique" for cuttings involves sitting the snapped off stems in a jar of water for as long as it takes me to get around to putting it in soil).
The failure rate is high, but each time it works is a little miracle. A fragment of green becomes an entire plant, whole and beautiful.
One of the delights is that you never quite now what will gaily throw out roots at the first hint of moist soil and what will sulk, turn sad and die. But it's a twig. What's to lose?
Well, you do have to snip the top-growth, or essentially the plant will operate as a cut flower - attempt to make a flower and seed (this can also be magical - I found a discarded pelargonium stem in a heap of laurel leaf sweepings, flowering with zero root in soil, the other day, a bright pink flower poked up incongruously through the coppery dead leaves - it was a decent chunk of stem I'd knocked off the plant and it had just enough resources to throw up a flower). But here you are capitalising on the plant's ability to mend damage, along with its granular nature - each part of a plant is also a plant, and if it has nothing better to do, it will try and repair itself.
With the top-growth snipped and decent soil contact and just enough moisture, lots of plants happily shoot roots from the stem. Not everything (I have doubts about this one - waxy leaves don't like being cut) but a snapped off chrysanthemum stem following a round of vigorous cat romping in the garden has already produced five new plants this year. It's also, of course, a way to feel much better about the situation when you accidentally take the secateurs to the wrong thing; ah! A cutting!
Though both these are incomer plants; twigs sourced from shrubs in other places. That can work out very nicely; I have a stunning Black Elder, a sweetly fragrant Jasmine and a lovely Flowing Currant that started as twigs in jars (my "technique" for cuttings involves sitting the snapped off stems in a jar of water for as long as it takes me to get around to putting it in soil).
The failure rate is high, but each time it works is a little miracle. A fragment of green becomes an entire plant, whole and beautiful.
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