> Next: Rooting, Layering, and Cuttings
Growing More Flowers and Bulbs
In This Section
Propagation is the gardeners’ term for reproducing plants. In this section, you’ll find discussions, explanations, and directions of various common methods of producing new plants from your own flowering plants and step-by-step demonstrations of each technique, including:
-
- How to grow new offsprings of your favorite plants that are exact duplicates of the original flower.
- An explanation of how plant and bulb breeders create new hybrids.
- How to collect, cure, plant, and grow seed produced by your existing flowering plants.
- How to divide and grow bulbs from divisions and from seed.
- How to take root cuttings and plant them to grow copies of flowering plants.
- The process of air and soil layering to grow roots on stems and branches.
- The process of bud-grafting latent buds to a new host plant or rootstock.
- The methods used to propagate bulbs.
On This Page
Here, you’ll find discussions and explanations about flower and bulb propagation methods on the subjects beneath each of the following titles:
-
- Flower Propagation Explained
- Collecting and Planting Seed
- Commercial Bulb Growers
- Bulb Propagation at Home
- Other Reproduction Techniques
Flower Propagation Explained
Propagating flowers and bulbs uses several methods to reproduce your favorite plants and make new hybrids that have traits of both their parents.
Those who wish to use these techniques to grow seeds, take cuttings, perform layering, or divide their own plants and bulbs will find it simple to creating copies of existing flowers or entirely new plants.
Let’s start by saying that most gardeners will find propagating flowers and bulbs unnecessary. After all, there’s a ready and varied supply of fresh, healthy flowers and bulbs available each year from garden stores, nurseries, and online sellers.
To have the exact flowers you want, plant breeders do all of the work. They cross-hybridize thousands of flowers each year, choosing only the best to send to market. Most are patented plants, and reproducing them is banned.
To get exactly the flower you want, choose parent plants that grow well in your climate and have the look and colors you want. These “cream of the crop” breeder choices are exact fits for your needs.
Still, there’s something exciting about watching nature perform its miracles. In the end, it’s up to you.
Collecting and Planting Seed
The easiest propagation technique is collecting mature seed your flowers form and replanting it.
Anyone, even children, can enjoy great results by harvesting and replanting seed.
Usually, seed collected from flowers grown with so-called “open pollination”—uncontrolled reproduction relying on visiting bees and other insects—produces hybrid plants. The results may surprise you.
Open-pollination may create hybrids that look the same, similar, or completely different than the flowers you planted.
Some species hybridize freely, while others only develop fertile seed with a few close relatives. That’s part of the fun. Give it a try the next time some of your flowers set seed [see: Collecting and Saving Flower Seeds].
Plant experts—hybridizers—use closed pollination to understand and predict these mysterious results. They protect flowers from pollinating insects, carefully dust each flower with pollen from a known parent plant, and replace the cover to protect it again.
After rearing the seed, they typically find new plants with the characteristics they bred the parents to produce. It may take thousands or more trials, and many years, to get the exact traits they seek—color, flower form, fragrance, height, disease resistance, or other desirable characteristics.
For exact duplicates of specific flowers, use other techniques that create genetically identical twins [see: Rooting, Layering, and Cuttings].
Commercial Bulb Growers
Growers carefully develop new bulb varieties, called “hybrid cultivars,” by sexual reproduction.
They dust pollen from one parent plant’s flower’s male anthers onto the female stigma of another bulb. This produces entirely new bulbs in a magical and somewhat unpredictable process.
Breeders produce many thousands of these new bulbs each season, but most destined for obscurity.
Only a few of their hybrids, plus even fewer”sports”—random genetic mutations— end up cultured and distributed for gardeners to buy and plant.
Breeders choose parent plants with specific genetic traits, such as those with unusual blooms, striking color, disease and pest resistance, or cold hardiness. Their unique features make them ideal for reproduction and propagation.
Growers also use plant-tissue culture, gene splicing, and other advanced techniques. These are necessary to clone exact duplicates of the most promising bulbs.
But all of these steps take time, and the time adds up. It may take a dozen years or more before a new hybrid bulb is available for gardeners to grow in their yards.
Bulb Propagation at Home
Home gardeners use many methods to produce clones and hybrids of their favorite bulbs.
It’s relatively easy to harvest offsets of bulbs after they naturally divide. It’s also simple to divide rhizomes and tubers. Both produce fresh plants from old favorites.
Propagation also includes techniques that require greater patience and skill.
Other Reproduction Techniques
Some lily plants, for instance, grow bulbils in their leaf axils—the point where their leaves join their stems.
Culture bulbils to grow new individual plants by planting them in a special way, rearing them, and allowing them to mature into new lily plants.
Create new plants of tuberous begonia and dahlia by taking stem cuttings of fresh shoots, rooting them, and allowing them to form bulbs.
Grow new hybrid bulbs from seeds gathered from ripening flowers.
When a flower stalk remains on the bulb after its bloom fades, it swells and develops seed. The offspring grown from these seed are not the same as their parent.
They are, instead, a cross-hybrid of the original parent mated with pollen from another of the same or a closely related species.
These hybrids have growth habits, bloom colors, and forms that are different than the parent plants—sort of the same as how children look similar to, but different than, either of their parents.
Growing Bulbs from Seed
Try your hand at raising new hybrid bulbs from seed collected from mature flowers of bulbs you grow.
Harvesting and culturing bulb seed is a bit challenging. With experience, however, you’ll easily master it.
Start by allowing seedpods to develop after your bulbs’ flowers fade to grow, turn brown, and become brittle.
Next, collect them. Crack each pod open over a sheet of clean, white paper. When they break, they’ll release their tiny seeds.
Then, you’ll need to cure them. Gather, label and store the seeds in individually sealed containers or glassine envelopes in the vegetable keeper of a household refrigerator for 2 months.
Finally, remove them from the refrigerator, and plant them. They need loose, rich, moist, sterile potting soil.
Keep them moist as they grow roots, under glass or another transparent, moisture-trapping cover. Hold their container at a temperature of 62–75°F (16–24°C).
The seeds will sprout in one to two weeks, first producing two-leaved sprouts, then leaves similar to other bulbs of their species.
Uncover them, watering whenever the soil starts to dry. Transplant them outdoors in spring. Lift the tiny bulbs at the end of the season and store them indoors over the winter. Be patient. It may take 1–3 years before they mature and produce their first flowers.