How to Propagate Viburnum Plants
Viburnums are a wonderful garden plant, and they're easy to propagate, and we'll demonstrate how to take the cutting propagation techniques, and we will show you the result. Grow viburnums for flowers, and the Japanese snowball, or Viburnum opulus, is perhaps the best example of this one. 
how to propagate viburnum plants
It masses random snowball white flowers in spring. You can also grow them from the shape of plants like Viburnum Plata moresi, with its teered growth habit, which also has wonderful flowers as well as amazing autumn or fall foliage, and both of these along with others can be propagated from cutting soft wood. Cutting is the easiest, and they're taken in mid-spring to early summer. This is a softwood cutting. You can grow these in soil or water. We prefer the soil method as it involves less handling.
Hardwood cuttings are a little more difficult, and they're taken in fall or autumn either way. The ideal cutting length is around 6 inches for the softwood cutting and 10 inches for the hardwood cutting. Before you prepare the propagation mix, you can use a normal potting mix and it will work or a specialist mix of 50% Pete and perite are also suitable for the softwood cuttings.
Water the plant well the day before taking the cutting so that it's fully hydrated and take the cutting in the morning. It's important to take the cutting just below a node; this is a node; it's simply where the leaves join the stem. You can also take a heel cutting; this is where two stems join and you're still taking a node. When you take that heel, the nodes are where the plant will send out new roots. Remove the leaves from the lower 2/3 of the plant and then Trim back the leaves remaining with seers or pruners, and this helps reduce transpiration. Dip the lower part of the cutting in a liquid or powdered rooting hormone.
You can also use honey if, if you don't have either of these, just plant the cutting. Without them, you may not get as good a strike rate, but you should get some cutting to work. Place the cutting in individual pots or three to four in larger pots. Spray cover the pot with a CL or plastic bag and place them in a warm position out of direct sun but still good light.
We come to retaining moisture through miss spraying and also putting some sort of cover or clo if you like over the top of the plants. You can use a plastic bag like this supported on sticks, and that works fine. You can use a plastic soft drink bottle, cut the bottom off, sit that over, and it's a little bit easier to use because you can miss spray through the top with a plastic bag. You need to lift that up and miss spray from underneath, or you can use something like this, which is CL with the you can open these vents. Miss spray through the top and
Close them again. with the plastic bottle When you finished Miss Spraying, you can place a top back on the bottle, which will keep the moisture in the plastic bag. Just tuck it in around the plant, and that will also keep the moisture in. Here are some plants that we propagated earlier. This one here is an interesting one.
We had a large cutting and simply placed that in water. In fact, we left it there for about 4 to 5 weeks, and then when you can see the roots that are forming on that one already. That's been transplanted into this pot, and while we were doing that, we took a cutting off that larger piece, and you can see that that one too is already starting to put on new growth. You can see it on these leaves here early on.
You need to keep Miss Spraying because you don't want the plants to dry out. Your cutting should have a root system in 4 to 6 weeks and be ready to pot up in 12 weeks, although in single pots you can leave them in there for 12 months before planting up into a larger pot or even planting out into the garden as for hardwood cutting.
You take these in midwinter. We're longer cutting around 12 in again, just below a node. We use the same propagation mix, perlite, and Pete always uses liquid or powder rooting hormones with hardwood cutting. 2/3 of the should be below the soil level. Keep moist, not wet, and soggy. They should commence new growth in spring and should be ready to pot up the following spring if you'd like more information on propagating plants or indeed any other garden matters.
