Cutting Propagation of Large Leaf Rhododendrons Deciduous Azaleas

摘要

RareFind Nursery is a specialty nursery in central New Jersey. Our customer base is internet mail order, retail at the nursery, and high-end landscapers. We carry over 2,000 plants, half of which are rhododendrons and azaleas. Propagating our own rhododendrons is a necessity, due to the fact that our list contains cultivars not available elsewhere. Many of our plants are being propagated for the first time; therefore there is no rooting track record, as there is for standards such as 'Roseum Elegans', 'Nova Zembla', and 'Catawbiense Album'. In fact we rarely sell these standards, which are easily rooted. We do purchase tissue culture plants, which account for perhaps 50 of the 1,000 or so rhododendron and azalea cultivars we typically stock. Therefore we must root our own, usually in smaller lots, for which we are often "flying blind" with little specific cultivar experience. In a given year we root approximately 10,000 rhododendrons, but we rotate our list of plants and limit it to about 500 cultivars per year. This is not a formula for efficiency!