The process of vegetative propagation of plants is based on their high ability to regenerate, that is, to recover from one part of the whole organism. At the same time, daughter plants inherit all the maternal traits, including valuable varietal qualities.
Vegetative propagation of plants is carried out using various organs, both specialized (tubers, bulbs, rhizomes), and non-specialized (leaves, stems).
In the wild, vegetative propagation of plants is widespread. Some species generally rarely reproduce by seed. These include bulbous, lilies of the valley and many others. Strong underground wheatgrass rhizomes make this weed almost invulnerable. No weeding does not allow you to completely get rid of it, but the whole thing is in the numerous buds of renewal, which literally humiliated rhizomes. From these buds, the plant can recover even if a piece of a couple of centimeters long remains in the soil.
Forest strawberries propagated by stolons (mustaches), which are a type of aboveground shoots. The whiskers take root in the nodes, and young plants develop from the adnexal buds, which soon begin an independent life. Some trees can also propagate vegetatively. Often broken branches of willows and poplars, getting into a humid environment, take root and form full-fledged plants. There are even cases when willow rods stuck into the ground as a hedge take root and turn into trees. And the reason for everything is the vegetative propagation of plants, which sometimes manifests itself in the most amazing forms. The fat girl popular in indoor floriculture, which is popularly called the money tree, easily propagates by leaves. Under favorable conditions, roots form on the petiole of the leaf, and a new plant forms after them. Moreover, it is not even necessary to create special conditions for this - often the leaves fall to the ground and root themselves.
Vegetative propagation of plants has been widely used in the practice of crop production. This is an opportunity to get a larger amount of yield in a shorter period compared to the seed method. A popular example is the propagation of potatoes by tubers or strawberries with a mustache (stolons). And in case you need to propagate a young specimen, the flowering and fruiting of which will not come soon, the vegetative method is simply indispensable. It is used to obtain a huge number of plants - herbaceous perennials and annuals, deciduous trees and shrubs, and even conifers.
Artificial vegetative propagation of plants is especially relevant in those cases when it is necessary to preserve varietal characters of complex hybrids. There are various methods of such propagation: cuttings, dividing the bush, rooting of layering, grafting, the use of tubers, bulbs, rhizomes, daughter sockets, leafy cuttings.
In indoor floriculture, vegetative propagation is most often used to obtain plants, examples of which can be seen on ordinary home window sills. People living in urban flats, senpolia, dieffenbachia, pelargonium, ferns, begonias, ficus, and many other plants, as a rule, get it in a vegetative way. And not surprisingly, it is much easier to put the cuttings in water or to plant them in the soil, having previously treated them with a stimulant, than to mess with seeds, the germination of which is often in question.
Vegetative propagation is a valuable invention of nature, which is actively used in modern crop production and has several advantages over the seed method.