Layers

Today Joe the gardener has cut back the Akebia quinata chocolate vine as it was taking over other stock plants areas so he brought it to me to pot up the rooted stems. As it is a semi deciduous twining climber the nodes will produce roots as well as shoots if they are moist enough like when they creep along the ground and root at each node.

So I went through and found all the rooted nodes and chopped roughly around them, mainly to start working on them as soon as possible as they are now bare rooted and it was getting quite sunny.

Then I chopped them to size when it came to potting, I used 9cm square pots to provide as much space at top for them so I could get a bigger plant with potential to root and shoot more if I had more than one node.

As well as aiming for ones with a short enough internode so I could have two nodes in each pot I also sometimes chopped between two and then put them together again in the same pot, and if some are flexible I bent them to fit.

I pot them with the stem just as the top, like they would layer themselves naturally so they do also create shoots.

Here’s ones I did in autumn; you can do them anytime, it just depends on aftercare.

Do you grow from layers? How do you do it?