Hardwood cuttings, or plants for free
Now the leaves are falling and the autumnal murk has comprehensively rolled in, it might be tempting to store away your boots, oil your tools, and leave the garden to the worms. I am all for the season of rest and recovery, but there is one job that you will never regret making time for right now, and that is taking hardwood cuttings.
Why take them?
Go forth & multiply
The obvious reason for hardwood cuttings is that you get plants for free. Absolutely loads of them potentially. I nipped into my local plant nursery the other day for a bag of multipurpose to pot up my first sowing of hardy annual seedlings into and there were sales of tired looking plants everywhere. I was particularly thrilled with an almost-expiring honey coloured Verbascum. (I conveniently forgot that I get mullein moth in the field; I’ll have to plant it under netting somewhere else. Maybe in with the cabbages.) But any woody shrubs that are on the list below are worth rescuing for a bargain price and bringing home for cutting harvesting. Often, they are tired and very sad looking because the soil isn’t right, the pot is too small, or they have been over/under-watered. Or simply just because the general public doesn’t like buying plants that are going into dormancy because all the leaves fall off.
If it looks diseased, don’t risk it. Leave it behind.
Getting the plant back to full health might be an uphill struggle, but taking cuttings and essentially pressing the reset button on the conditions can work absolute wonders. If you are feeling particularly strong, you can even cut the parent plant back almost to a stump and throw it away.
No, I can’t do that either.
Top tip: The younger the parent plant, the easier to grow from cuttings so you don’t have to invest in big plants. You can try and take cuttings from any plant, just take extra and look after them a little more assiduously.
At the opposite end of the scale, sorting out a very overgrown or wrongly placed plant can be done with cuttings. I have two in mind. Firstly, a philadelphus that I put in the cutting hedge along the south side of the flower field, bordering the greenhouse. The lilacs have thrived, a single hornbeam (another garden centre end of season bargain) is looking fabulous and needs regular persuading that it is part of a hedge and not a tree in a forest. The philadelphus (mock orange) is sad. It flowers late and poorly. Its shape is thin and straggly. It has been there for about ten years and it surrounded by brambles and some stone that fell out of a wall. There’s no way I am going to dig it out. Neither of us would survive the experience.
Second, I slipped a jostaberry (a gooseberry blackcurrant cross) cutting in at the base of the fence around my studio courtyard. I thought I would train it along the horizontal rails. The fruit bush had other ideas and went off in all sorts of directions. The paved path is on one side, and some rather lovely hoggin on the other, hence me using a cutting in the first place. Again, not an option to dig out and move. And it needs to move. Not only does it drench me as I go past every time it rains, it also needs to go in a fruit cage. It had a glorious crop this year and I blinked and the pigeons took the lot.
One of the reasons why I quite like the idea of cuttings is that a plant sending out roots into the soil feels like a much better foundation for healthy growth than a plant taken out of a pot. I had some instinctive understanding of this. Every so often, I would come across a plant that I had grown on in a pot and dig a hole for and wondered why it wasn’t thriving. I’d rummage around in the roots and pull it out, perfectly pot shaped. The roots hadn’t sent out into the soil at all, and if your soil has any cloy in it at all, you can sometimes just put the whole plant in a soil bucket. (A way of avoiding this is to take some time to tease out any ‘circling’ roots, and loosen the side of the hole.)
Cloning
Yes, it does conjure up slightly strange imaginings of scientists and sheep, but cloning plants can mean you can multiply very special plants, or plants that adore being in your garden. When I was at Sea Spring Seeds the other week, we talked about how some heirloom varieties die out because their seed isn’t open pollinated; the seed inside the fruit is a mix of all sorts of genetic material so it won’t come true. Joy told a story of one woman who had kept one tomato plant alive for twenty-five years through cuttings. She adored it, the most perfect, sweet, yellow tomato and there is no seed to be had anywhere. So every autumn, she took a shoot off one of the summer’s vines, popped it in a glass of water on her kitchen windowsill, and planted it up in the spring, all good to go again.
So if you have the cornus whose bark is the perfect shade in winter, a Cotinus that flowers at exactly the right moment in the late summer, then the world needs more of them.
When
Just after leaf fall.
What
Before we get to the how, a list of quite how useful a skill taking hardwood cuttings is. All of these wonderful shrubby plants will strike from cuttings. Although as I have said in other places, it is very rarely a one hundred percent success rate so always take more than you think. Except willow. You only have to look at willow for it to root. It is banned here because it took my husband two weeks to dig out an enthusiastic willow hedge. I keep a secret one for making rooting hormone (see below) but if I make you a wreath, it’ll be hazel.
Suitable plants for hardwood cuttings
most deciduous shrubs
Abelia
Buddleja
Cornus
Forsythia
Ribes
Roses
Viburnum
Hydrangea
Deutzias
Weigela
Physocarpus
Spirea
Climbers
Honeysuckles
Jasmines
Fruit
Currants
Fig
Gooseberries
Jostaberries
I think box and hedge honeysuckle are technically semi-ripe cuttings, but these methods will work just as well.
How
Choose healthy stems, small branches or vine sections from your shrubs, trees or climbers. They are slower to root than other kinds of cutting, so they need to be bigger – to provide the cutting with enough food to survive until it has rooted and can fend for itself. As a general rule, aim for cuttings that are around 20cm to 25cm (8-10in) long, and roughly the same thickness as a pencil – not spindly, and not too thick.
One you have chosen your stems:
Cut straight across the stems, cutting across with a clean, sharp implement just above a bud.
Then cut off any soft growth at the growing tip end of the cutting. Cut at a sloping angle so water will run off the top of your cutting, and so you can easily see which end goes up.
Cut your chosen stem/branch/vine section into pieces around 12 inches in length. (Making a straight cut at the base, and a sloping cut at the top of each section.) If you have made the willow rooting hormone (see below), this is the moment to pop them in that.
Fill a round pot, preferably terracotta, with a mix of compost and grit, or perlite if grit is tricky to get hold of. Put the cuttings around the edge.
Water well once, then keep damp but not wet over the winter.
Making a willow rooting hormone
You will need:
Young willow branches, the diameter of a pencil or smaller
Boiling water
Glass jar
First, harvest your willow branches. You want to harvest young branches, ideally in the first year of their growth. The branches should be no thicker than a pencil. Then, remove all the leaves from your branches and cut the branches into bits. They don’t have to be too small, just trimmed enough to fit into a jar.
Fill your jar with your cut willow branches until half full. Pour boiling water over the willow and let the mixture steep overnight. Strain.
You can use this to soak hardwood cuttings in in between trimming them down and pushing them into compost, of you can use it to do that first water.
Troubleshooting
Not all of my softwood cuttings took, and they were never going to, cuttings are not an exact science and I recommend that at least 50%. more than you need (depending on the plant of course, rosemary is a more enthusiastic rooter than a rose). Some research as to the blackening stems suggested that if they are blackening from the top down, they are too dry.
This is the game you play with all cuttings, soft, hard or semi-ripe. Too little moisture and they shrivel and die. Too much and they rot and die. Hardwood cuttings aren’t quite as fragile as soft though, so you can afford to be a little less intense with them. Oh, and grit is your friend.