Starting Roses From Cuttings

Root your own cuttings as a fun and low-cost solution to get more plants in your garden.

By Andrew Weidman
Updated on October 1, 2024
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by Adobestock/skymoon13
Rooting cuttings is a time-honored technique.

Starting roses from cuttings can be an easy and low-cost solution to get more plants in your garden. Learn how to root roses and consider checking the plant variety patent list.

As gardeners, we want all the plants. We also want to try every growing technique. And we want to get all of our plants cheap — or, at least, our budget insists we do. So, what’s a gardener to do?

Rooting cuttings is a time-honored technique for getting cheap plants. An entire mythology exists around the subject. For example, cuttings are often called “slips” because common folklore holds that these cuttings only prosper if “slipped” off the bush when no one is looking. There may be a grain of truth to that one. A torn end, especially one with a heel of material from the main branch, will often root better than one that was cut square with a pruner. That may be because there’s more damaged material to produce scar tissue, a process called “callusing.” Callus tissue is like the plant world’s version of stem cells (pardon the pun).

Another tradition is that you never say “thank you” for a gifted plant or cutting. Maybe that refers back to the idea of slipping cuttings in secret. After all, if you thank the donor, did you really steal the plant? Whatever the reason, my mom would never “say the kind word” when I gave her a tomato plant or a houseplant. In fact, she’d tell me, “Well, I won’t say the kind word, but … you know.”

Whatever the case, rooting cuttings can be as simple or as complicated as you and the plants make it. Find a good reference book, such as The Plant Propagator’s Bible or The American Horticultural Society Plant Propagation. Alternately, a quick online search will also provide a wealth of information, much of it wrong, so rely on university sites (URLs that end in “.edu”) or get second opinions from trusted gardeners.

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