propagation from cuttings

has anyone had success propagating fruit or shade trees from cuttings? if so, which species? i know some will root easier than others, but i'm looking for a little input as i have a few experiments in the works now.

Good Luck

I doubt you'll have much luck. But certainly try.

Fruit trees propagate well by stooling. You can also air layer. Cuttings would probably have to have misting and good horticultural practices etc.

I've rooted Ginkgo under mist in a poly tent in a green house. Most everything I do is from seed and grafts so I don't remember the details but I recommend a manual by Michael Dirr...Propagation of Woody Plants or something like that. Soon I am possibly going to enlist the help and assistance of a friend who roots material in rooting a rare maple, Acer x 'White Tigress'. It is a cross between an Acer pensylvanicum and an Acer tegmentosum. It has magnificient stripes of white on green bark. Most all improved Red Maples, i.e. 'October Glory', 'Red Sunset' etc. are rooted. Most fruit trees are grafted/budded onto superior root stock. Look for the book.

Are we ready to <i>Rock</i> ???

This is a really good time of the year to talk about asexual propagation of trees. Rootings, cuttings, air layering, are all ways to reproduce trees without reverting to seed. You are, in the truest sense, cloning.

The reason this is a really good time of the year to talk about cloning is because we're still in the dormant season, just ahead of the time of year when more successful trys are done. In fact, the time is <b>now</b> to actually start doing it.

Let's make <u>March 1</u> the official start of cloning season !

hear...hear
<img src="http://www.partyoutfitters.com/itempics/games/CLOWNS.JPG">

Right On

I think I'll go out tonight and sweet talk some antique apple scion into a little propagation-fest and have it conjoined to some Budhovsky #9.

Let's give a big, biological Yee HAaaaa

Then it's <i>UNANIMOUS!</i> Cloning season has begun!

I feel like the moon and the stars have lined up on this one.


We'regonnahavesome fun !!!

Our humble Elmore is a closet genius in the area of grafting. One of our Sponsors, Rainbow, may be interested in the work we have to do in the cuttings arena. I even know a person who could contribute to the in vitro tissue culture aspect of cloning.

However, the thread is clearly titled <b>propagation from cuttings</b>.

is it OK to lead with an overview of tissue culture? That would be brief, as it has nothing to do with anything any of us would do, but it is interesting and connected in a way (it's a method of cloning plants).

Then there's grafting. Should this thread be about cuttings and grafting? or just cuttings? We could have three threads, or just one. I vote one thread for all methods of asexual propagation.

What does everyone else think?

Offer my services

TexasNative,
Send me some scion's from your fruit tree and I'll "clone" that tree for you. If its apple, I've got dwarf, semi dwarf, semi standard rootstock.

If its peach, I've got Loring rootstock. Anything else, and I can get it. I'll send it back to you next winter.

i have cuttings of Prunus mexicana, Cordia boissieri, Magnolia grandiflora, and Liriodendron tulipifera, as well as azalea "formosa". i set a 12"x24" tray and lay a bed of perlite in the bottom of the tray, with an indole3butyric acid solution diluted in water below the layer of perlite with the cuttings set in the little cylindrical peat moss seed starters, and the cuttings have been dipped in a powdered iba prior to setting in the peat moss cylinders. the peat moss cylinders wick moisture through the perlite, and the perlite keeps the cuttings from being in standing water. in another tray, i have cuttings in perlite only with an iba treatment. everything is indoors at room temperature (70'F) with two 40 watt flourescent lights. for cuttings with flower buds, should i cut the flower buds off so that the cutting will revert more energy to developing roots, or should i let them do their thing? i vote one thread for all methods of asexual reproduction myself. btw, great website! i'm glad that i stumbled upon it.

It sounds like you have a fairly decent start on your propagation project.

For more reading, if you don't have it, get Jill Nokes - How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest.

It is from the UT Press.

Yes, very good start. You know how we love pictures...

Qustion about your indole-butyric acid, synthetic auxin, Root-tone. IBA is not very soluble in water, nor is the carrier. How did you get it dispersed in your perlite tray?

Also, the cuttings that you dipped in the powder, and then put in the perlite, did you get the feeling that the powder might be blocking the water tubules right at the cut? Did you dip them in powder, paste or solution?


How do you get the cuttings to stand up in perlite. How deep is it, do you have a problem with them falling over?

I would pop the flower buds off one half of the cuttings, leave the other half alone. Chances both will do OK, but you get the answer you ask.

On what date did you start the project. We wanna keep active in the progress in Texas monitored at least weekly up until they go in dirt six weeks or so from now.

Thanks for the reference TreeTX. We should keep a running list of resources.... wait... that's the beauty of a forum. If you share a resource, it just <i>just became</i> part of the running list.

I've been thinking about propagation threads, all headed under one title, and although tissue culture will likely be only a page or so, 'Grafting' could go on for a long time. So can 'Cuttings'. In rethinking, this thread could get huge and deep and vascillate between different propagation techniques within the same thread. If we create distinct threads, we always have the option to hyperlink between them, the common relevancies.

I change my vote. I say better to <i>focus,</i> in specific technique that go with the method on thread. Cutting, grafting, by seed, tissue culture. Four distinctly seperate methods of propagating a tree. Lets run all four threads alongside one another, each in their own packages.

Is there a thread running on transplantation?

i am sad to report that all of my cuttings have died with the exception of 2 magnolias. they are potted and have started new growth. i took the cuttings in january.

Two is good. There are hings you learned. It's still early in the propagation season. Let's share methods, staying on the topic of Cuttings.

Typically you should root your semi-hard wood cuttings in mid-June.

Semi--hard. Is that meaning like the first-year green wood?

Gumneck.....Please explain what stooling is and can I do it to a weeping higan cherry? Thanks! Joe.

The tree in the pics came to me quite by acident.

One morning, when going from here to there, I saw this dude walking down a thoroughfare, I asked if he needed a ride. He smiled big, got in an began thanking me. "Six months I've been walking, and you're the first person to ever offer me a ride."
"The World sucks. Where ya goin?" I asked.

He was on my way home and I'd saved him 45 minutes on getting home. He was really thrilled.

I pulled into his driveway and noticed an extremely unusual tree, one that I had never seen. I asked him what kind of tree it was and he voiced a Latin Genus specie. "Tell me about it, will you?

He points to a half dozen others and says, "Follow me around the back".

Out back were a small plantation of this same specie of tree, arranged in rows, evenly spaced. I was intrigued.


There's a whole story here of the project he had going on, the tons of leaf litter and the earthworms.

The tree is special as it is a nitrogen fixer. His entire back yard was dedicated to bioconversion and creation of fine, earthy compost; 100% organic, rich humus. Soil. I was wholly impressed.

As he was telling me details of these trees, the growth rate, and he tugged this growth coming off the trunk and accidentally snapped it off. He threw it to the ground. I sez, "Why not root it?"

Impossible. We've tried many, many times. It just doesn't happen. I looked at the explant and being a fast growing plant, should root quickly, in maybe 10 days. It needed, during that critical period, an absolutely ideal micro-environment.


I think I'm in the 8th or 9th day since I adopted it. I pretty much have not disturbed the plant since dropping it into straight water, and it did well being left alone to recover and begin developing callus, and then diferentiation into root primordia.

That's where I started taking pictures. I just think this stuff is so fascinating......

Here's the apical meristem region (4) and 2 stem shots showing root primordia (9 and 10)