XXII 



HOW TO MAKE SLIPS AND CUTTINGS 



It is one of the delights of gardening that among plants 

 two and two do not of necessity make four as in arithmetic: 

 they may become six, or eight, or twenty-five, or even fifty, 

 in the hands of a clever gardener. In July and August, when 

 the honors of the season belong to the perennials and annuals, 

 and last year's begonias, verbenas, and geraniums are leading 

 a secluded life in an out-of-the-way corner of the garden, the 

 latter might with a little trouble be made to employ their 

 leisure and devote their ungainly branches to producing flour- 

 ishing families of little verbenas or geraniums, as the case 

 may be, which will be abloom this winter. 



There are many ways of multiplying plants, and the mak- 

 ing of cuttings is one of the easiest. A cutting is a portion of 

 a plant which is cut from the parent plant and set in the ground, 

 where it may begin life on its own responsibility. It may be 

 anything from the leaf of a rubber-plant to a tiny twig of a 

 cedar or an oak tree, but if it is cut from an older plant and 

 set in the ground to root for itself it is a cutting. There are 

 root cuttings, tuber cuttings, stem and leaf cuttings. The 

 stem cuttings are the most familiar. Of these there are "hard- 

 wood cuttings," made in the winter or early spring, when the 

 plants are dormant — ^this is the way in which most shrubs 

 and vines are increased — and "soft-wood" or "green" cuttings, 

 made in the summer, of growing wood (if of shrubs), while, 

 with herbaceous plants, all would be "soft" or "green" cut- 

 tings. 



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