Taking Cuttings

When you're trying to establish a stand of trees or bushes (or planting anything that germinates slowly, for that matter), a far cheaper and faster option than buying plants in can be to take cuttings off some overgrown branches of a friend's plants with their permission, and get them to root and form new plants.Ideally, when taking cuttings you should try to start the end that you want to root around one of the points at which the parent plant branches, and trim the smaller branch of your cutting back to that point, as for botanical reasons that I haven't bothered to research yet, the cells around such a node seem to find it easier to change their growth pattern into a root. You can also improve your chances by treating the tip that you want to root with a solution of 'rooting hormone', usually particular synthetic auxins that instruct the cells there to grow root structures.

In my case, to create a fast windbreak hedgerow, I have a couple of brilliant plants available for the job, where my friend and their neighbour have willow trees and blackberry brambles, which grow so vigorously that you can often just shove a stick in the ground and it will root. In fact, the former is so good at spreading by this method that it is considered an invasive weed in Australia, and my friend tells me that one time they tried to make a fencepost out of a freshly cut beam of willow, it grew into another tree where it was placed.