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Dogwoods are propagated by several methods, including by seed, bud grafting, rooting cuttings and to a lesser extent, tissue culture. Native dogwoods are usually grown from seeds, while propagation of various cultivars is usually carried out by vegetative methods. Cultivars are produced by grafting buds onto C. florida seedlings or by rooting of softwood cuttings (Dirr and Heuser, 1987; Witte, 1995; Badenhop, 1985). Of the two vegetative methods, budding is more common. Although budding sometimes results in undesirable sprout production from the understock and requires skilled and experienced labor, Badenhop (1985) suggests that it may be economically beneficial if carried out on a large scale by big nurseries with good field irrigation and greenhouse facilities. Less than 5% of dogwood production is by rooting cuttings. An increase in production by rooting cuttings is desirable because it has several advantages over budding. The use of cuttings produces trees with straighter trunks that are less susceptible to infestation, since no wounds are created during their production (Badenhop, 1985). However both rooting cuttings and budding depend upon the season and can be unpredictable. Although tissue culture is not economically practical, it is quite useful as a research tool to produce quickly many copies of a particular genotype from a small stock that may be ornamentally important or have certain disease resistance genes. One complication with this method of propagation is that dogwoods have been difficult to root in tissue culture. For information on how to care for your dogwood, see FAQs. |
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Special thanks to Anjana Sharma for content of this page.