Adenium Propagation

Adenium propagation is not something I have really understood or tried before. I did get some seeds when I ordered some Obesum plants and so I tried to get them to grow. They did, but what are they?

When trying to get seeds from your mature plants, what will be the outcome? I don’t mean will they produce a seed pod, I mean if after getting a seed pod, planting and growing the seeds, waiting for time to grow, what will the flowers look like when they come? I can’t seem to get a good answer really.

Maybe you can improve some of your chances by hand polinating the flowers and when doing so you need two plants of the same type and you collect pollen from plant 1 and polinate plant 2. Will this guarantee you get the same flowers or leaves on the new plants? Maybe, maybe not.

Seeds

You got some seeds in the mail. When growing seeds what type of plant are you going to get to grow? Very hard to say it seems.

You get a plant to form a seed pod. What will the flowers of the newly grown plants look like? Who knows.

I was recently told that my plant that produced a seed pod wasn’t grafted, and so I can name the flowering plant whatever I want to call it. That is the point in time that I understood Adenium are so very different than other plants I grow and propagate.

Cuttings

Cuttings seem to be a larger portion of the hobby. A cutting will produce the flowers that you expect since it is the same plant from which it came.

Of course if the plant you take a cutting from if grafted and you make the cutting after the graft, it should be as the grafted portion of the original plant. If the mother plant has 4 different grafts and 4 different flowers, then a cutting from the grafted area producing color 1 will produce color 1 later as the cutting grows.

This may take a bit of time to produce more of the plant you love, but you are pretty sure what it will look like when it grows up.

Grafting

So now to cinsider true grafting?

Basically this starts just like a cutting described above.

However, this cutting is grafted to mature rootstock or Caudex and therefore it can get to a larger size more quickly. It already has roots, a big caudex, and potentially the mother caudex can accept graftings from variouos other plants and therefore procude many types flowers.

Growing for the Caudex or trunk

So while this is a bit off track, many are trying to grow for certain attributes like a thick caudex, a golden on, black trunks, etc. In this case people do try to polinate from two plants that have say black trunks in the hopes that the new plants will also have that trait.

Maybe the trait is the curly DHA type of leaf? Maybe, but a curly leaf can also grow flat depending on the environment where it is grown.