Tip Layering

by Alan Titchmarsh

Midwinter isn’t the time you’d usually be thinking of doing some serious plant propagating, but its perfect for tip-layering – an old but effective way of propagating all sorts of cane fruit (blackberries, loganberries etc) and ornamental rubus species such as Rubus thibetanus and ‘Benenden’; also the unusual dual-purpose Japanese wineberry which has stems clad in a ‘fur’ of attractive foxy-red bristles and tasty wine-flavoured berries that you’d never find in the shops.

You might even give this method a try for your favourite rambler roses; there’s nothing to lose. First select a few stems that are long enough to bend over so the tips touch the ground. Then in a suitable spot, fork a little well rotted organic matter into the soil, loop a stem over and hold it down with a bent piece of wire like a hairpin – some people simply dig a little hole and bury the tip a few inches down.

Water in dry spells, and in three to six months (longer for rambler roses) you’ll have a good young plant ready to sever from its parent, dig up and move. Now, if the soil isn’t very good or the plant is growing on a wall alongside a path so there’s no soil available to use, you can still tip-layer a shoot, but instead of open ground use a pot instead.

Choose one about five inches across with a single large drainage hole in the base. Push the shoot up into the pot through the drainage hole leaving several inches of shoot sticking out past the rim of the pot, then pack the rest of the pot with moist multipurpose compost. Wrap a poly bag round the pot held in place with elastic bands to stop the compost falling out, and lay the pot on its side.

You’ll probably need to water the compost so it can’t dry out badly, so check it several times. It’ll usually be obvious when the tip has taken root; then simply snip the ‘umbilical cord’ to release a brand new pot-grown plant. It’s a great way to produce more plants of varieties you grow, to pass round to friends, but it’s also a technique you can do in a non-gardening friend’s garden, and go back to collect your booty months later.