Vermont farmer. [volume] (Newport, Orleans County, Vt.) 1870-1877, 1875-05-07
Principles of Horticulture.
XIII. CUTTINGS.

OIL. When separate portion OF plant
is caused to produce new roots and branches,
and to increase an individual, it is cutting.
312. Cuttings are of two sorts cuttings
properly so called, and eyes.
BIB. A cutting consists Of an internodia,
or part of one, with its nodi and leaf.bud.
3l4. When the internodia is plunged in
the earth, it attracts fluid from the SOIL and
nourishes the bud until it can feed itself.
3l5. The bud feeding at first upon the
matter in the internodia, gradually elongates
upwards into branch, and sends organized
matter downwards, which becomes roots.
BIG. As soon as it has established a COM
munication with the soil, it becomes q new
individual exactly like that from which it
was taken.
3l7. As it is the action of the leaf.buds
that causes growth in cutting, it follows
that no cutting without a leaf.bud will
grow.
3lS. Unless the cutting has great vitality
and power of forming adventltious leafbuds,
which sometimes happens.
3l9. The eye is leaf-bud without an
internodia.
800. 1t only differs from cutting 10
having no reservoir Of food on which to ex-
ist, and in emitting its roots Immediately
from the base of the leaf-bud into the SOIL
32l. As cuttings will very often, if not
always, develop leaves before any powerful
connexion is formed between them and the
soil they are peculiarly liable to suffer from
perspiration.
800. Hence the Importance of maintaining
M M in N ufaka nF k,,
midity, as is effected by putting bell or other
glasses over them.
1913. In this case, however, it is necessary
that if air-tight covers are employed, such as
bell-glasses, they should be from time to
time removed and replaced, for the sake of
getting rid of excessive humidity.
324. Layers differ from cuttings in moth
ing except that they strike root into the soil
while yet adhering to the parent plant.
325. Whatever is true of cuttings is true
of layers, except that the latter are not liable
to suffer by evaporation, because of their
communication with the parent plant.
326. AS cuttings strike roots into the
earth by the action Of leaves or leaf-buds, it
might be supposed that they will strike most
readily when the leaves or leaf-buds are in
their greatest vigor.
327. Nevertheless, this power is controlled
so much by the peculiar vital bows of differ
ent species, and by secondary considerations
it is that impossible to say that this is an
absolute rule.
328. Thus Dahlias and other herbaceous
plants will strike root freely when cuttings
are very young; and Heaths, Azaeas, and
other hard-wooded plants, only when the
wood has just begun to harden.
800. The former is, probably, owing to
some specific vital excitability, the force of
which we cannot appreciate; the latter
either to kind of torpor, which seems to
seize such plants when the tissue is once
emptied of fluid, or to a natural slowness to
send downwards woody matter whether for
wood or not, which is the real cause of their
wood being harder.
$50. If ripened cuttings are upon the
whole the most fitted for multiplication, it is
because their tissue is less absorbed than
when younger, and that they are less likely
to suffer either from repletion or evapora-
tion.
33l. For, to gorge tissue with food, before
leaves are in action to decompose and as
simulate it, is as prejudicial as to empty
tissue by the action Of leaves, before spong-
Oles are prepared to replenish it.
1872. For this reason pure silex, in which
no stimulating substances are contained (sil-
yer sandy, is the best adapted for promoting
the roofing of cuttings that strike with diff
Guilty.
1888. And for the'same reason, cuttings with
what gardeners call heel to them, or
piece of the older wood, strike root more
readily than such as are not so protected.
The greater age of the tissue of the heel rem
ders it less absorbent than tissue that is al
together newly formed.
334. 1t is to avoid the bad effect of evap-
grafton that leaves are usually for the most
part removed from a cutting, when it is first
prepared.