Tip Cuttings of Perennials

When you have a favorite perennial, you may want to grow it in quantity. It's surprisingly easy to propagate -- make more plants -- by rooting tip cuttings.

If you have a large space to fill with perennial flowers and a small budget, take heart! You can learn to propagate or make more plants all by yourself by taking and rooting tip cuttings. This is one of those gardening "secrets" that seem mysterious and sound difficult or technical or fiddly but are actually pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it.

Sure there are other ways to propagate your perennials. Seeds are inexpensive but can be time consuming, and of course you have that pesky issue of seed variation so your plants will be variable once they eventually grow up to be mature enough to bloom. Division is reliable in that your plants will be an exact match to the original, but that process requires you to dig up or, at the very least, mangle your mother plant....

This is where tip cuttings come in. Tip cuttings are easy to do, produce new plants relatively fast, do not endanger the mother plant, and well, they're free. Plus you can quickly make lots of them! Whoot!

So how to do that? I just came across a terrific step by step tutorial with clear photos to show you what to do along with the written directions. (Not that it's rocket science but personally I do like to see an example to clarify what the instructions are trying to say.)

Leave it to the folks at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to offer good educational material on their web site. Here's their great version of directions on how to take tip cuttings from perennials.

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Copyright May 28 2007 Barbara Martin All Rights Reserved