You must be wondering why i’m showing you these plants these are the indoor chinese arms which are sold so commonly throughout europe and america and these arms are propagated here at herons and you must be wondering why i’m showing these to you now these particular arms are produced from root cuttings root cuttings meaning that when i prune a tree like where we do repotting the long roots that come out this is a typical route that came out if you just plant that root in soil you’ll get a new plant and in china a lot of the indoor bonsai that are sold as chinese herms are in fact produced from root cuttings because nothing is ever wasted and the chinese amp roots from root cuttings very easily that’s another route can you see quite clearly it is a root and from the top you get those plants you see so that’s a root cutting these are all very thin roots you can see i’ve used very thin roots and just putting the thin roots in they’ve all rooted i’ve just put a bunch of roots in there and we’ve got so many plants starter plants of chinese and just by putting thin roots into a pot of soil and they produce plants the same with this so all these chinese arms are produced from what we call root cuttings now how do we get root cuttings i will just show you species by species this is a chinese elm that a customer brought to us he forgot to water the tree can you see such a thick trunk tree he forgot to water it and the tree died so i’ve tried to revive it of course the main tree didn’t die but one of the side shoots started to grow and i bet there will be lots of useful roots in there which we can salvage for making root cuttings and you can see what i did i planted it inspect the moss the famous peter chance most trick and the moss revived the tree so a part of the tree survived and all these so you can either make stem cuttings from all these if you cut each of these and stick it in soil you’ll get hundreds of plants from them but the other way to produce the plants is from these roots you look at the roots come here look closely all these thick roots the ants have the habit of producing roots like this so if you were to take these roots out how many plants would you get and the more you cut the more you get so we’re not damaging the plant in any way we’re just stimulating more growth i’ll put it back in that pot it will grow new roots and each of these plants will become root cutting so what i do is i usually like to leave so that will go and the tree will grow from there so all this will be the source of endless root cuttings so from that tree if i cut it say here i can get a plant there i can get several plants so there you are straight away i’ve got three and so there are about 50 cuttings in that root cuttings that we can make from the air so the chinese zone certainly produces root cuttings very easily now you’ve got to know that not every plant produces plants from root cuttings the japanese maple for instance is an acer does not produce root cuttings we did a video earlier on about repotting that great big english field maple a second pastry and asap compestery produces root cuttings very prolifically if i can just show you some examples of course because we are in february the roots haven’t started coming out of the plant but let me show you what i have here these are root cuttings look at that ugly roots you see that root just came out of the ground like that and i just put it in a pot of soil and look at all those roots that have generated can’t even get it out so that was a root that i took out so you can get a beautiful tree from just planting that root there’s another one here you can see clearly it’s a root and that’s produced new shoots and if i keep cutting these roots however find the roots i will get a new plant from that so these are ready to put into individual pots to make individual trees that’s another funny route from field maple there you go that was the root you can still see that it looks like a root it’s clearly a root so if i wanted to make an instant bonsai just trim the branches back and then plant it at an angle we can put a rock even underneath that and you’ll get a very interesting bonsai now supposing i wanted to make another root cutting i can cut that off like that so i’ve got one tree there and another tree is going to grow from here so you can get add infinitum endless source of root cuttings now these were the thick roots we cut off from that great big field maple so each of these you see your roots now with that one if i don’t want the tree that long i can cut it there and this will make another plant you’ve got to make sure you plant it the right way if you plant it upside down it may not take so you got to remember where the roots go so that would be planted so all these you see how the roots going so that’s another plant so all these will become separate trees now i was just saying earlier on let’s look here these were the trimmings that we trimmed off that great big field maple you may think that these are very thin but they’re not that thin they’re about an eighth of an inch thick if i want it to be stingy you look at the lovely curve there i can cut that off and i could get a beautiful little curved mommy tree not just one i can get probably two trees in pots they will all become little trees little trees so all these fine roots can make root cutting so nothing is ever wasted so you don’t have to just use thick roots of course if you use the thick roots you will get an instant tree with a trunk that thick which normally would take years and years to grow so the thicker the root the thicker the trunk you will get so all these will become thick trunk fuel vapors this is another field method that i did only last year we never waste anything and you can see oh they’re so vigorous i can’t even get them out okay i can cut them off default taken is what a lot of root is produced in just one season just one season and that clearly was a root like any of these roots you can see that was a root produce more wood there and i’ve got an instant tree and if you want to make an instant bonsai how about that that will make an instant tree there so that only took about six months to produce and so there’s endless number of root there was another lump of root that i found from another field maple and this was only planted in the autumn and you see that beautiful tango root and that’s going to be a very interesting piece you know with a thick trunk like that and i’m going to uh get new branches because there are no branches yet the tree is well alive you look at the green underneath it’s not dead so that’s going to grow in the spring so that was a root lump of root from field maple english field maple this is also another root cutting this is i think an older tree they grow easily from root cuttings now you must be wondering how do i know which trees grow from root cuttings and which don’t you will soon get to know i i’m not a plant pathologist so i don’t know the plant uh physiology that you know encourages trees to produce root cuttings uh only certain trees produce root cuttings from my experience the ones that we use for bonsai the elm i mentioned the field maple i mentioned the other thing is uh what we use is wisteria this is a wisteria plant and these are produced from root cuttings we just dig the roots out when we prune the trees and we stick it in soil and lo and behold you get a plant from the root so that is root cutting the other one i need to show you is crab apple now this is a big crab apple and this is a crab apple i took last year this was a root and because the roots were so interesting i am growing it over a brick to produce a root over rock on a brick but i will show you what we do now supposing i were to re-pot this tree so we will find invariably some thick roots are there i’m just showing you what i would do so a thick root like that i can probably cut that off and make sure i don’t cut all the roots off because i want to leave enough root for the tree to grow strong it’s just showing you the principle so that is a thick root and you can see already it’s got root there so if you plant that you’ll get a nice little tree with a thick trunk so that would be a root cutting so that is crab apple for you the other one which related to the crab apple those of you who know a bit of botany the rosetti family or the rose family which it includes hawthorne kai normally which is the quince japanese quince or the chinese quince as well they have this habit of producing suckers this is a japanese queen sky anomalies and it’s about to start flowering all the little buds are there but you notice that this plant suckers profusely these are roots that sprout up and make plants so because they sucker rather than let it spoil the shape of the tree if you were to just cut these roots off plant them in pots you will get individual trees so all these suckers can be pulled out so just by observing in nature plants that sucker profusely of course they are the roots which send shoots and you get new plants so that is what we do with crab apples and this is chinese this is japanese quince quinomonies see look at the roots look at those roots they will all become usable as plants so we have plant all these up to make individual plants and then leave the tree to have just like a single stem so sake of saving is just interesting to produce bonds in that way so that we put back in its pot and we make new plants from that the other one that grows quite well is the ficus carica or the edible fig now i have some edible fig here i will just show you this one this is the edible fig they have the same sort of roots as the kai normally has and of course the roots here are quite ugly so where i have an ugly root if i just prune this ugly root off i can make that as new tree so this the varieties that produce root cuttings you can just use the roots that you would normally discard when you do root pruning let me find the branch root pruner and you pull that off so that root if you pull out you see you already got some root there so that will make a new plant looking at this tree it has a lot of ugly roots going round and round unfortunately when plants are grown in flower pots they have this habit of circling the root in the technical term that we use we call it a girdling root a girdle going round and round the trunk of the stem and they are considered ugly so we don’t want them so this ugly girdling root i will take out so i may not have the time to do it i’ve got to do it patiently so you can pull that out make that tree look nicer and we’ve got another plant from that so this is how we go about getting root cutting so it’s really showing you the principles every time of how to produce plants from another method which is growing plants from root cuttings so there you go don’t throw this [Music] you
