taking cuttings

In the greenhouse I have been taking cuttings, some experimental and some that have worked in the past, if we don't get a late hot spell that cooks them.  My last batch of perennial wallflower cuttings shrivelled to a crisp one sunny day.

I should like more Sarcococca confusa.  It is such a useful evergreen, shade tolerant, fairly drought tolerant, weed suppressing, graceful in habit for something so dense, and bearing little white flowers in late winter that are marvelously strongly scented, the sort of fragrance that catches you at a distance rather than demanding that you bury your nose in the bush.  Googling propagation sarcococca it seemed that my options were seed, or semi-ripe cuttings in July or August.  I duly made a note to myself to take cuttings, and yesterday finally got around to it.  Well, it was still August.  They were quite small cuttings, maybe three inches long, and as well as stripping the leaves from the section that would be buried in compost I had to nip out the beginnings of next winter's flowers, which were already forming.  I put some pots in the ordinary covered propagator and some with gentle bottom heat and we shall see what happens.  It will be a race against time, whether they manage to grow roots before drying out.  They still looked shiny as of this morning.

Still in the spirit of experiment I took a few cuttings from the trailing bedding verbena in the pot by the front door.  I don't need them to root, in that they are common enough plants, I don't need lots, and could easily buy new anew in one of the local garden centres next spring, but having read somewhere that you could take cuttings of bedding verbena I was curious to see if it worked. Besides, who knows, one of these years I might want a lot of plants, or to keep a less readily available strain going.  It was difficult poking about the plants to find any non-flowering shoots, and I had to content myself with nipping out the nascent flower clusters, thinking that if this didn't work then I'd wasted some flowers.  I could only find tiny little cuttings not much over an inch long.  I gave them heat.  They looked like something that would appreciate some heat.

Searching around the base of the plants I managed to find three potential cuttings on my three Arctotis 'Flame', obtained at such cost and aggravation after they got delayed in the post and had to be nursed back from death's door, arriving yellow and virtually leafless.  It might be nice to have more than three plants, and as I don't know how well they will overwinter in the greenhouse I should like to spread my bets.  An article by Sarah Raven in the Telegraph said that tip cuttings two and a half to three inches long should root within three weeks, and I read somewhere else that at Kirstenbosch they root Arctotis throughout the year, using sand.  Sarah Raven recommended adding one third grit to the potting medium, suggesting that good drainage was important, so I opened up some John Innes seed compost with added perlite.  I couldn't find anything looking like a tip cutting that didn't have an extremely well developed flower stem growing from it, and took young newly emerging shoots instead.  Even then I had to nip the flower buds out.  I haven't got around to doing the pink Arctotis yet, but was relieved that the cuttings from 'Flame' did not collapse overnight.  They look so fleshy and fragile it is difficult to imagine them lasting for a fortnight without roots in their pots.  I gave them heat as well.

The cottage pinks do not get bottom heat, but do get added perlite.  I've propagated a lot of pinks in the past couple of years and it generally works, unless they roast or rot.  With any luck at this time of the year they will not get too hot and dry out, and the perlite should prevent rotting. After sampling the advice on the internet I am satisfied that perlite and vermiculite are not interchangeable, despite some views to the contrary, because vermiculite absorbs water while perlite does not, so a potting mix made up with vermiculite will tend to sit wetter.  My aim with the cuttings is to prevent the buried stems from rotting, so wetter is bad.  The mnemonic I use to remember the difference is that perlite is drier (which rhymes, sort of) while vermiculite is wetter and the v at the start of vermiculite looks a bit like w for wetter.  When in doubt I Google it again.

I did not use a hormone rooting powder.  I used to, then I kept reading how the active ingredient only had a short shelf life and none of the products available to amateurs were very potent anyway.  Plus the woman in charge of propagating for Suffolk Plant Heritage did not bother and seemed to think it was a pointless exercise.  Given that the active ingredient does break down rapidly it is rather poor that manufacturers don't put a best before date on the pots.  Perhaps my view of garden centres is jaded, but if they had a dozen pots left over at the end of the growing season I would not trust them to chuck them out and restock with fresh product next spring.