142
0
Recently I was visiting a friend’s garden and she showed me some new plants she was nurturing that had been given to her from other gardening friends. She didn’t even know the name of a couple of them, – they were simply pretty pass-along plants!
If you garden in the South, you know that an important part of our heritage is to share and swap plants with neighbors and friends. It might be a mystery plant with a pretty bloom that reseeds all over your yard. Or it might be the cutting from a favorite camellia or hydrangea. I know if I visit a friend who has a vegetable garden that I will never leave without a few tomatoes or a “mess” of peas or a seedling to plant in my own garden!
A pass-along plant is really just a plant that can be easily propagated through seeds, division or cuttings and then is given away. The Peachtree City Garden Club holds a plant swap each May, and a good many of the plants for swapping have been propagated by our club members. It is gardening on the cheap! You really can get something for nothing when you cut off a stem and stick it in the ground and a new plant emerges!
When I receive a pass-along plant, I usually also receive a story about its history. My grandmother was an avid gardener and grew a cutting garden each year to provide flowers for the church altar on Sunday mornings. After she died, my dad dug up many of her bulbs, like the daffodils, and planted them in his garden. I now have some of the same daffodils in my backyard. It is a way to preserve our family history and honor those gardeners who came before us. I look at those daffodils and see my grandmother. It is a connection to my gardening lineage.
Many pass-along plants are tough, old plants that you can’t find in nurseries today. Unnamed antique roses are still found growing heartily in old cemeteries and underneath the weeds and foliage in abandoned backyards, you can still find plants surviving and blooming without any care at all. Pass-along plants really are hardy souls that do not need to be pampered.
Some familiar pass-along plants include canna, angels’ trumpet, camellia, gardenia, banana shrub, daffodil, day lily, iris, crinum lily, confederate rose, gladiolus, sedum, harlequin glorybower and rose of Sharon.
August is the perfect time to snip off cuttings from some of your colorful annuals (like coleus) and other tender plants that won’t last after the first frost. Water plants you want to take cuttings of the night before and snip your tip cuttings in the morning using hand pruners. Leave the top two sets of leaves and trim off the rest. Dip the stem in rooting hormone and plant in a small container of soilless potting mix or simply place them in a cup of water on the windowsill to root. Pick up an old fish aquarium at a garage sale and you have the perfect greenhouse for your cuttings. Besides coleus, you can take tip cuttings from geraniums, salvia, sweet potato vine, Angel’s trumpet, Alternanthera, Fushia and many more of your favorite plants.
Why not continue the tradition and give a friend (or give a child) a pass-along plant to tend and you might be starting someone on the great adventure of becoming a life-time gardener.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.