I love growing new plants. If I could, I would happily spend all my working days (and a bit more time besides), sowing seeds, taking cuttings, dividing, nurturing, and potting my babies on until they are old enough to live on their own.

Stipa capillata seeds





You might say – well, you run a nursery now so you’ve got your wish! Partly, yes. But there’s the garden to maintain and improve, staff to organise, ordering compost/pots/new plants, the tea room to run, accounts, queries, watering to do (lots!) and, of course, the all important customers to look after. Often, my spell in the potting shed is a quiet hour at the end of the day when everyone else has gone home. It is bliss.



I ran two propagation workshops last week and am running two more this week. I take a group of nine people, explain some core principles, demonstrate some techniques and then take them into the potting shed to get stuck into a pile of plants. It’s great fun and everyone seems to enjoy themselves. All of the workshops have been full, with a waiting list too.

In response to the huge interest there seems to be in propagation, I’m going to share some of my thoughts on this blog in a series of posts – in a logical sequence, I hope! To narrow things down a bit I’m going to stick to my personal field of interest – hardy plants, especially hardy perennials and shrubs. If you were here for one of last week’s workshops this might be a handy refresher. If you’re here this week – read on or don’t as you see fit! We just dip into this for the first 5 minutes anyway….


Where to start? 

At first glance there seem to be a myriad of different ways to make new plants. But, at the heart of it, there are really just two…

1. From seed

If you’re lucky this week, you’ll spot a drift of primroses (Primula vulgaris) which have self-seeded in a pretty mass of lemon yellow along a woodland bank. To the naked eye they all look identical.

Astrantia maxima

But to make a seed, a plant has to fuse two separate sets of DNA together from a male and a female cell. No matter how alike the parents may look, a new plant grown from seed is never absolutely identical to its parents or its siblings. 

This ability to produce like-for-like offspring but with enough variations in its gene pool to cope with a wide range of conditions is a great attribute in a plant. It’s why Primroses grow in Cornwall and Aberdeen. 


Many superb garden plants also come ‘true’ from seed and are reliable performers year in year out. Knowing which ones you can rely on to come true is key. The next section below explores this in more detail.






2. From part of the parent plant.

But many of our favourite garden plants are cultivars – carefully bred over many years, or discovered by chance as one off variations. Mostly, they don’t come true from seed. To produce another plant the same, you need to take a piece of the parent plant and clone it. Not only will it look identical, it will actually be genetically identical. Fortunately, cloning a plant is a lot easier than cloning Dolly the Sheep.




In the plant world, cloning is called vegetative propagation and there are a myriad of methods. It can be as basic and brutal as slicing the plant in two with a spade, as fiddly as nipping off a little shoot and persuading it to grow roots in a pot on a windowsill, or as technical as taking a tiny piece of a leaf and growing a baby plant in a test tube (I can’t do this and neither can you, unless you have access to a micropropagation lab). However it is done, the result is a true genetic clone of the parent plant and it will look identical too. We’ll talk more about vegetative propagation in later posts. 

This plant is Astrantia ‘Star of Fire’ – a stunning new cultivar, presumably produced by micropropagation (tissue culture).

What will I get if I grow plants from seed?


Good question. Most gardeners, when they think about growing from seed, tend to imagine vegetable growing, annual flowers, or wildflowers perhaps.  Attractive, garden worthy, long-lived plants aren’t their first thought and possibly don’t feature at all. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps because that’s what most of the seed racks are filled with at garden centres. 



Primula vialii



But there are a great many wonderful ornamental plants that can be easily and cheaply grown from seed. The question is, how do you know what you will get from your seeds? Will a plant come true or will it vary?

If you know the proper, botanical name for your plant, the answer to the question is easy – it’s right there, in the name. Any plant with just two parts to its name – Genus and species – will come true from seed (OK, that’s not an absolute rule, but it’s a great place to start). Someone gave it a Genus+species name, possibly centuries ago, precisely because it can reproduce itself reliably from seed. It’s a very handy piece of information.

  • Primula vialii –  stunning plant, most unlike any other Primula
  • Lychnis chalcedonica –  Maltese cross, you may know it as?
  • Verbena bonariensis – shockingly overpriced in some garden centres – it’s seed raised!
  • Knautia macedonica,  – like a magenta scabious – very pretty indeed
  • Geranium wlassovianum –  gorgeous purple flowers – perhaps my favourite geranium
  • Aconitum napellus  – tall, rich blue, early to flower and wickedly toxic
  • Catananche caerulea –  a papery delight in our dry front garden


All of these lovely, hardy and perennial plants are grown from seed here on the nursery and grow true to their name. Growing from seed means we can produce a great many plants more cheaply than if we bought in plugs from elsewhere and gives me a reliable supply. 

But I know my plant is a named cultivar. What will I get if I sow its seeds?


So your plant name will look something like this:

  • Astrantia major ‘Ruby Wedding’
  • Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’
  • Gaura lindheimeri ‘The Bride’
  • Geranium ‘Orion’
  • Delphinium ‘Astolat’
The name in inverted commas at the end confirms that it is a cultivar – a bred, or discovered variation from the original species plant. Your plant may not produce seeds at all – many cultivars don’t – especially if they have ‘double’ flowers i.e. rings of petals within petals. 


If your plant does produce seed the plants you get may look more like the parents they were bred from than your choice plant. You can at least be certain that the seed from Astrantia major ‘Ruby Wedding’ will produce an Astrantia major of some sort. You may get a new and lovely form. But even if your offspring look remarkably like the plant you collected the seed from, it wouldn’t really be right to call it by that name if you were thinking of giving it or selling it to someone else. You could say ‘seed raised from …’ or ‘ex … ‘ which is the more normal convention.

You sometimes see ‘Series’, ‘Strain’ or ‘Hybrids’ as part of the cultivar name. This tells me that they are usually seed raised. The plants may vary visibly in appearance, but perhaps have a common feature such as height or leaf colour. Kniphofia ‘Bressingham Hybrids’ and Geranium pratense ‘Midnight Reiter Strain’ are good examples. 

Having said all that, I’m now going to have to partly unsay it. Very many plants have proper cultivar-like names, yet are commonly grown from seed by growers. I know this, because in the highly respected wholesale catalogues I get each autumn, some of the names have a note next to them to say they were seed raised. How is this?
I can only say that it must be by accepted convention among growers. Perhaps a plant which comes true from seed was given a nice name and it has stuck. Perhaps it is was named first and then found to be so reliable from seed that it has become the established means of growing it. Maybe one grower started growing it from seed and everyone else followed suit. Echinacea purpurea ‘Rubinstern’ is a prime example. Primula japonica ‘Miller’s Crimson’ is another, seen here at Arley Hall. Most named Aquilegias are seed raised too. 



I don’t mind that they are grown from seed – how great that we can grow such great plants so readily! But I still feel instinctively twitchy about putting a cultivar name on a seed raised plant. Sorry to confuse you…. It certainly confuses me. 


What if I don’t know the name of my plant?

If it’s a plant you like, and it seems to produce seeds, sow them and see – who knows what you might get!


That willl do for now. In the next post we’ll talk about successful sowing and growing from seed. There might be a little video too….
April 16, 2012  
  , ,