Six on Saturday – 22/2/2025

Categories six on saturday40 Comments on Six on Saturday – 22/2/2025

I should have taken a set of pictures on Wednesday; it was quite nice then but has been blowing a hoolie and raining most of the time since. What little is happening out there is wet and windswept. My first bright idea for a fallback was to pick six pictures from the same date in the last six years but what they mainly show is the same things that are out there now. So I’ve gone off at a different tangent.

(This in the name of keepy uppy of Six on Saturday, where people with green fingers come together to show off six of their wares on a Saturday. The “rules”, such as they are, can be found in the participants guide.)

Instead of six disparate choices, I’m going essentially with one but splitting it into six parts. I bought a plant of Begonia carolineifolia a few years back. It’s a species from Mexico and Guatamala so not remotely an outdoor plant in the UK but by last summer I had potted it on into a 20L tub and it was just too big to stay inside. I stood it in a shady, sheltered spot in the garden where it happily spent the warmer months. Come autumn I brought it into the greenhouse but it evidently wasn’t warm enough for it and its stems are dying from the bottom up, suggesting something that started in the roots. I had been wanting to propagate it but it has stems around 4-6cm thick and digitate leaves like a horse-chestnut. Neither stem nor leaf cuttings seemed much of an option. Wrong, it turns out.

One.
The poor plant is outdoors in the rain and wind, looking very sorry for itself. I’m not going to try to save it but may yet take some more cuttings. The second picture is of it looking happy in the garden last July.


Two.
Someone told me it would go from leaf cuttings, so last July I took a leaf and cut the leaflets off near the base of the blade. I put both the leaflets and the base of the leaf into a pot of perlite, then put it into my propagator. I took the picture of the pot at the time but the chopped up leaf was done yesterday for illustrative purposes.


Three.
This was the pot yesterday, just out of the propagator. Most of the old leaflets have disintegrated but several have produced plantlets, as has the leaf base. Roots had grown extensively into the clay granules of the propagator.


Four.
I separated out the young plantlets trying hard not to damage the roots. They seem to form a bulbil similar to those of Begonia ‘Torsa’ or B. grandis, then start producing leaves. I think some of the original leaf sections probably produced more than one shoot.


Five.
I potted 8 plantlets into 9cm pots, put the four largest indoors and the other four back into the propagator. Scrabbling through the perlite I found three more bulbils which hadn’t started to grow leaves; I put them all in one 9cm pot in the propagator. I think if I’d searched harder I might have found more. Even so, 11 from one leaf isn’t bad, assuming I can get them all to grow away.


Six.
When I moved the big plant in at the end of October, I knocked a side shoot off. With no idea what would be the outcome, I sliced it into five pieces which I put in my propagator. The tip section I pushed in vertically, the other pieces I laid on their sides with most of their buds on the top side. They have also rooted and the buds have started to grow. I have potted the tip section and one of the other pieces and brought them indoors.

What had looked like a serious propagation challenge turned out to be easy. I seem to remember paying around £9.00 for the original plant, which had about two inches of stem and a few leaves. Now that I’ve had it several years and have a second generation on the go, that seems like good value looked at from one direction and overpricing from the other.

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Published by Jim Stephens

Gardener, no-dig allotmenteer, camellia enthusiast. I love colour, it cheers me up. Retired nurseryman.

40 thoughts on “Six on Saturday – 22/2/2025”

  1. Fantastic! I have been fiddling with the begonias here and you are having more success. I love ‘blowing a hoolie’ It sounds dreadful. I need to give steves leaves another look. They were out of everything I wanted.

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  2. Jim, your post today is wonderful encouragement to propagate all of those bits and pieces we knock off accidentally and those large plants we can’t necessarily save come autumn. Excellent photos, and a great step-by-step of your process. I’ll look forward to spring photos from your garden once your weather clears. I believe that many of our storms are blowing across the pond to bless you with blustery winter rain as well. It is a very small world sometimes. Here are my six for the week, finally, some color again! https://woodlandgnome.wordpress.com/2025/02/22/six-on-saturday-awakening/

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    1. Westerlies are our prevailing winds, so the majority of our weather comes from your side of the Atlantic. We don’t blame you for the bad stuff, nor do we give you credit for the good stuff. Today was a lovely day, sandwiched between two shockers. I was out in the garden all day and could easily have put together a six except it was too late. I’m still agonising over the half of the Begonia that still seems sound, I might have a go at repotting it in a smaller pot. I hate throwing things out but I don’t want to saddle myself with a high maintenance, low return plant. I did take another five cuttings this morning.

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      1. Your Begonia reminds me of B. ‘Griffin,’ which is easy to purchase in our area and very easy to propagate. I normally root pieces of stem in potting soil outside in warm weather. Now I’m inspired to try your method with stem sections to see how it works with Griffin. It also gets quite large, but I overwinter them in the garage or indoors. They are pretty when they bloom but the leaves are why anyone grows them. I’m glad you ended up with a nice day today. We did too, with sunshine and temps above freezing. We got out of the driveway for the first time since Wednesday morning before the snow began. Our weather comes mostly from the West Coast or Gulf Coast, and quite often the two systems combine before they reach us. That was the case with our latest storm and it was very unusual for us to get 6 or more inches of snow this late in the season. But better now than in April! I hope your can reinvigorate your Begonia with repotting. At least Begonias are easy to maintain.

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      2. I think I have the same variety, though I bought it under the name ‘Gryphon’. I haven’t tried to propagate it and really should, it’s very handsome. I don’t recall mine ever flowering and I’ve had it four years or more.

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      3. Jim, it is likely sold here as ‘Gryphon’ here too and I misremembered the spelling. This Begonia doesn’t bloom every year, and had a relatively short period of bloom when it does. The flowers on mine are creamy white with a touch of light pink and appear in panicles like those of an angelwing Begonia. It propagates easily and is very tolerant of a wide range of light conditions. Its leaves are just spectacular. I grew one in a coir lined hanging basket that was fixed to a post instead of hung, in part shade in a public garden a few years ago. It was simply spectacular for month after month and increased in size very quickly. I don’t recall what vine I grew with it- most likely it was Dichondra ‘Silver Falls,’ but the two performed well with little more than some Osmochote and regular irrigation. You might try adjusting your fertilizer and giving your plant a bit more light this summer to see what it does for you.

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    1. We have had Streptocarpus, still have S. saxorum but have killed all the others. One day I’ll try again, they’re so lovely. I see Robert Pavlis has a few YouTube videos on growing them, on Garden Fundamentals.

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      1. It’s always reassuring to know other people have issues with them 😁 I have studied Dibley’s advice but still without long term success, and will definitely check out Robert’s videos – thanks for that, Jim

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    1. I took another five cuttings this morning, just can’t stop myself. I have very little idea what I will do with them all if they grow. We sell a few bits when we have the garden open, Sue sells some plants at one of her craft markets.

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  7. The Propagator is really a workhorse! Also I’ve started to think of it as a character. Don’t know the answer to something? Let’s go ask The Propagator.

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    1. You know the guy who started this meme blogged under the the name ‘The Propagator’? I took it on when his other interests took too much of his time. There’s an element of paying homage when I do anything about propagation.

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  11. What a fun post. I have never tried to propagate anything from leaf except succulents which are easy-peasy. Seems this was not so hard either. It is nice to be able to get so many plants from a single leaf.

    Do people worry much about loss of genetic diversity when cloning plants? Nothing from me this week – studying for a test. Also a bit freaked out about the situation over here. Everyone is in damage control mode.

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    2. I suspect that most people if asked whether they worried about loss of genetic diversity because of cloning plants wouldn’t even know what you meant, far less worry about it. Many, if not most garden plants are clones, selected for superior performance in some respect. I’m not sure that there aren’t more problems with the very narrow genetic base of large scale non-clonal crops like cereals.
      Totally sympathise with your worries about your political situation, a lot of us over here are pretty concerned too.

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  22. This is what we occasionally do with overgrown Philodendron (of various species) as they grow up too high and abandon their lower trunk to rot. They do not need this procedure, but we do it to bring them lower to the ground, and because they can look silly with a short section of a trunk suspended by aerial roots. For some types, only the terminal portion is worth growing. For others, including Monstera, we might get a few cuttings from the short portion of stem.

    These are my Six:

    https://tonytomeo.com/2025/02/22/six-on-saturday-late-winter-color/

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  23. You have very cleverly turned Six on Saturday round by bringing your successful experiments in propagation into one post. If you factor in all your time, and previous knowledge of propagation, space and equipment, then factoring in inflation I don’t think the plant was overpriced at all, if anything it was an absolute bargain. Thanks for the insight. Here is my post: https://noellemace.blogspot.com/2025/02/from-garden-six-on-saturday-21-february.html

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    1. I am wondering if I have to subscribe to your posts to be able to comment directly! I still haven’t solved the puzzle. But I am enjoying your choices. Snowdrop ‘Sprite’ is very attractive as is the Oxslip primrose.

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