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CUTTINGS - Part 1 |
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Propagation by cuttings is unfortunately not as common today as in bygone years. There was a time when even keen home gardeners knew the names of very few roses. They frequently took cuttings, or slips, from others' gardens to their own. Often the newly acquired variety was named in honour of the friend from whose garden it came. These were mostly the old Tea roses.
The decline in the use of this mode of propagation is probably due to two factors: firstly, the huge expansion of commercial rose-plant growing, providing inexpensive plants in a well-advanced state; and, secondly, the difficulty in striking some modern roses as cuttings. A rose plant grown from a cutting is often referred to as an "own-root" rose. It is a great pity that more of them are not being grown in suitable varieties. There are no suckers to worry about; the plants probably live longer; and there is no budding union where disease can occur and later destroy the plant. Roses that strike freely as cuttings and grow on to good big plants are all of sturdy types and seldom have much Pernetiana stock in their ancestry. Wood suitable for cuttings is vigorous and healthy, amounting to a combination of bud selection and stock selection. Many growers report that the vigour and disease-resistance of own-root roses improve with each generation. This double selecting may be the explanation. The best material for cuttings is from shoots that have bloomed. They should be cut with a heel of older wood. April, May, June, and July are the best planting months. The flowering shoot will have grown since February, the heel in the preceding few months. The entire cutting should be well-hardened wood, but less than nine months old. The upper part of the flower-stem, where the leaves are small, should be cut away just above the leaf, making a cutting six to nine inches long. Cut off all leaves. Cuttings must be kept from drying before being planted. They can be stood in a container of water, covered with a wet bag, or buried in moist earth. Under Australian conditions they can be planted direct into the soil where they are to grow to mature garden plants, or placed in rows fairly close together for transplanting the following year. Rose cuttings are very sensitive to manure and strike best in unfed sandy soil. The lower end of each should be inserted four or five inches into the ground. In heavy soil some digging and soil-loosening are necessary. The cuttings can often be simply pushed into light soil. Press the earth firmly round them and water liberally. |
