Propagation by cuttings can be tricky.
We’ve all seen Monty Don or Carol Klein show you how on BBC’s Gardeners World (or George Anderson if you are a Beechgrove fan). All the care required to prepare the cuttings and keeping them alive in pots looks like – and is – a lot of work.
Luckily, some plants root just so easily that they don’t seem to mind it if you cut corners.
My eyes were opened by a nurseryman over 20 years ago, when I bought a rose at a nursery near my house in Stirling. “Roses are easy to grow from cuttings, actually,” he said as he trimmed some branches that came off shrub roses and stuck them in the pot. “You can stick these in the ground and they will root. Don’t tell anyone!” I don’t think he was meant to give away free cuttings.
But he was right. The sticks happily rooted in the heavy clay soil of the garden and grew into full size shrubs in situ, producing gorgeous scented flowers the following year.
Since then, it became a habit of mine whenever a branch of a rose broke off to cut pieces and stick them in the ground. I’ve learned over the years that some plants are very easy to propagate this way. Apart from roses, I’ve had good results with rosemaries (almost 100%), hydrangeas and hardy fuchsias. Some rhododendrons too, although the success rate seems much lower.
The trick, I think, is to choose a piece of ground that’s not in full sun and is reliably moist (which is not always easy to find in my Dundee garden, where the soil is sandy and free draining). You can’t use this method with very soft cuttings (as they would bend or break when you try to stick them in the soil), but this method seems to work both with semi-ripe and hard-wood cuttings. Remove most of the leaves (if any) and stick them in the soil as deep as you can and forget about them, other than making sure the soil doesn’t dry out completely.
Not all take root, for sure, but you really don’t mind it when you’ve expended zero effort. Any success is a free bonus.
