Growing a garden from nothing .. or the multiplication effect!

One of the joys of gardening is creating something lovely out of tiny seeds, or seemingly lifeless stems. The art of propagating cuttings and sowing seeds is one of the miracles of gardening. It is always a thrill when a tray of brown compost that has sat lifeless for several days, or even weeks, suddenly springs into life with tiny green shoots emerging.

Of course, not all garden making, or plant multiplication, has such fast results. Take the art of propagating from cuttings, for instance. There are many ways to take a cutting from a large established plant, such as softwood cuttings, hardwood cuttings, root cuttings, aerial cuttings, layering for example. Each of these make identical copies of the parent plant and can be a reliable way of increasing plant supplies for your own garden, or to give away and share.

If you're an avid heritage and heirloom rose grower like me, taking semi-softwood cuttings in late Autumn is one way of increasing your stock of old roses. As a member of the Heritage Roses in Australia, propagating old roses from cuttings is a good way of making copies of a rose that may be quite rare, or no longer in commerce, and sharing it with other rose growers to ensure its survival.

Some of the old roses are fairly easy to propagate from cuttings, such as the lovely Rambler, New Dawn (shown top) and the Tea rose, Comtesse de Labarthe, often sold as Duchesse de Brabant in Australia, and colloquially known on the Sunshine Coast as the Montville rose (a nod to how well she grows in this slightly cooler Sunshine Coast hinterland climate). This rose is deservedly well loved in Australia as she is an easy care rose, that blooms almost year round in some warmer climates, and has the soft sweet scent you might expect to find in a pink rose!

Another rose that propagates well from cuttings is the Hybrid Musk rose, Buff Beauty. Bred by Rev J Pemberton but released in 1939 after his death by Pemberton's protegee, Bentall, this is a lovely, golden rose and a must for any rose garden. My original plant came from the Rumsey's rose nursery in Glenorie back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, I no longer have cuttings from this plant as I assumed I would be readily able to buy this rose after we moved south to the Hunter. It is on my 'wish' list but I haven't been able to find Buff Beauty as available locally as I had hoped. Buff Beauty is described by Heather Rumsey in her catalogue as having "Double flowers of soft apricot-yellow. When fully open centres are deeper and sweetly scented." I propagated several plants from my original rose which did well in our garden in the Sunshine Coast hinterland and coped with competition from vigorous plants , such as Tansy (shown below).

The Hybrid Musks don't fall strictly into the 'heritage' category of most old roses, being a new class of roses developed by Rev. Joseph Pemberton in the1920's and later by the Bentall's who continued developing this class of roses after the Reverend's death. There's an interesting story (I can't remember where I read this) that suggests that Anne Bentall was the likely breeder for many of the later Hybrid Musks, although at the time these were attributed to her husband, Jack.

There are some roses, even amongst the Teas, that are notoriously difficult to propagate from cuttings. Tea rose, Mrs B R Cant is one such rose and is more suited to propagation by budding, rather than cuttings. For this reason I have not attempted to propagate her from cuttings but I'd be very interested to know if someone has had good success with this. It is to my regret that I was unable to dig out one of my huge bushes and bring her down to join me in this new garden. I doubt she would have fitted into the removalist truck!!!

Of course, the other method of propagating roses is through collecting seed from hips that have been open pollinated or selectively pollinated. Open pollination is less predictable than selective pollination in terms of achieving a new rose that improves on the parent roses. However, I am unlikely to try to create new roses this way. This is a time consuming method that can take years to attain a garden worthy rose. I am sure it would be fascinating to take this up as a hobby, but for now I'll leave this to other enthusiasts.

There are some roses that need no encouragement to propagate at all, like this huge Cherokee rose (Rosa Laevigata) that was running along the ground and taking root wherever it touched the soil without any help from me. In fact I was forever trying to prevent this rose from self-propagating! It is magnificent in full bloom and the bees just loved it but I couldn't allow this plant to take over the whole garden!!

With a large rose garden, or a rose garden established for some time, chance seedlings can sometimes be found underneath or nearby roses. We found one such little chance seedling under the David Austin rose, Heritage, which was identical to Heritage but a sweet miniature version of its parent. Unfortunately this little rose, which we named after our recently deceased mini fox terrier, Little Jack, did not survive the drought. It's a shame because it would have been perfect to dig up and bring with us to our garden here in the Hunter.

As time goes on and our garden here becomes more established, I am hopeful that in addition to being able to propagate more roses, there will be some sweet little surprises self seeding around the garden.

Don't you love the multiplication effect of a garden!!