The Advantages of Propagating Plants

Identical

• Asexual propagation gives gardeners and horticulturalists a way to produce plants identical to the parent, something not always possible when growing plants from seed. A new plant grown from a stem cutting, for example, possesses all of the same traits of the parent. If the parent plant has an attractive color of foliage, you can propagate a new plant from a cutting and be certain the offspring will have the desired foliage as well.

Advantages Over Seed

• Propagation by using cuttings or other asexual methods sidesteps some of the difficulties involved in growing from seeds. Seeds often take a long time to germinate; in some cases, seeds might not produce seedlings for two or three years, depending on the species. You also do not need to wait until the seeds appear later in the growing season to reproduce the plant. Some types of cultivated plants do not even produce viable seeds, so asexual propagation is the only way to propagate them.

Types

• The various methods of asexual propagation include layering, where the low-hanging stem of a plant is buried in the soil until it forms a root system. The stem is not removed from the parent plant until the spring after it produces roots. Division involves dividing plants into separate sections after digging them up with the roots intact. Propagation by cuttings requires removing a stem or leaf of a plant and placing it in the soil to take root. Grafting joins the upper part of one plant, called the scion, and the bottom part of another, called the rootstock.

Tissue Culture

• A more unusual form of plant propagation takes place not in the garden, but in the laboratory. Tissue culture, also called micropropagation, creates new plants by taking tissue from the parent plant and inducing its cells to divide. Tissue culture has the advantage of producing more offspring than other methods, although the success rate varies depending on the skill level of the technician performing the procedure.