Are you familiar with the phenomenon known as the Chequebook Gardener? She (and I'm afraid it usually is a she) wields a hefty bank account and an expensive palette of mature plants to paint beautiful pictures in her borders. She is a kind of exterior decorator, and is obsessed with a polished, colour-co-ordinated, outdoor tableau. There are no gaps in her planting, no past-their-prime containers on her doorstep. Garden centres both dread and love to see the Chequebook Gardener coming. They hate the fuss, but love the dosh.
And fuss she does, because she eternally longs for everything to be just right - which of course it never is (plants have an annoying habit of growing bigger, wider or just different than you planned). And she, consequently, is never happy. In search of that elusive thing - the perfect garden picture - she writes more cheques, signs more credit card slips, and feels more guilty. The Chequebook Gardener needs help. Well, it so happens that a self-help book for her - and all other types of gardeners - has recently been published by the Royal Horticultural Society and Dorling Kindersley. Propagating Plants contains over 300 pages of expert, yet readable, information on how to make plants for free. Every imaginable method is detailed - seed-sowing, division, cuttings, layering, chipping, chitting, grafting and many more - with photographs, drawings and crystal clear instructions. And, incidentally, it comes just at the right time for the many gardeners like me who have recently received seeds of unfamiliar plants from seed exchanges (free seed schemes such as those run by the RHS, the Alpine Garden Society and the Irish Garden Plant Society.)
True, the impatient gardener may have to wait months or years for a mature or flowering specimen to grow from seed, from a cutting or a from chipped bulb. But, as anyone who regularly propagates their own plants knows, one's expectations magically slow down to a leisurely pace which exactly matches that of the plant's growth. Watching plants grow - your plants - is positive and life-changing therapy for the must-have-it-now gardener. And, of course, if you're continually taking cuttings, sowing seed or otherwise increasing your green progeny, after a season or two there is always a batch of something ready to go into the garden.
Forgive me if the above seems annoyingly obvious (as it will be to most gardeners) - but soon it may not be. The proliferation of handsome, ready-to-buy - yet of limited choice - plants on the shelves of garden centres and supermarkets means that we are forgetting how to make our own plants.
And that's a terrible pity, especially as the human race has been ingeniously devising ways of multiplying plants since the advent of farming in about 8,000 B.C. That's a hundred centuries of expertise garnered through trial-and-error, accident and hard, hard work. The ancient Romans, for instance, used to dip cuttings in ox manure to stimulate rooting. Later on, the Victorians placed a wheat seed in a slit at the base of a cutting: when the seed germinated it produced substances which induced the cutting to root more vigorously. Then in the 1940s, scientists learned how to create a synthetic rooting compound, used for decades by some gardeners when they took "slips" from their own or friends' plants. Now, we buy fully-grown plants from a shop and throw them in the bin when we don't like them any more. Where's the fun in that?
Making new plants is fun, and no gardener should be deprived of that. In some cases though, it's not just fun, but a duty to propagate plants - as in the case of those which are rare or endangered. Some, like the many Irish cultivars which have arisen in gardens in this country, have traditionally been passed from gardener to gardener and may depend on this mode of distribution for their survival.
Others are endangered in the wild, because their habitats are shrinking or because the plant's population is being eroded by man or beast. For example, the saguaro cactus (Carnegia gigantea), that tall, prickly icon of the desert - made famous by western movies and beloved by certain US garden designers - takes 40 years to flower. Subsequently it produces 10 million seeds each year, but only one seedling survives in five years. Thankfully the seeds are easy to germinate in more clement conditions than the Arizona desert, so a steady stream of saguaros can be propagated to keep both landscape architects and film producers happy.
Whatever your particular fancy: saguaro cacti for your own home-made western, epiphytic orchids for your personal rain forest or an avenue of giant Wellingtonias for your children's children, The RHS Propagating Plants will set you up nicely with all you need to know. It will also tell you how to multiply other trees, shrubs, climbers, perennials, annuals, biennials, bulbs, ferns, herbs and vegetables.
Propagating Plants (Royal Horticultural Society and Dorling Kindersley) £25 in UK