Dormant but Not Dead: Seven Shrubs Worth Sticking in a Pot This November

The case for cutting wood in the dark

By the first week of November the garden has largely stopped performing. Leaves are down, light is rationed, and the temptation is to retreat indoors with a seed catalogue and a mug of something hot. This is precisely the moment to take hardwood cuttings, and it remains the cheapest propagation trick available to UK gardeners: no heat, no mist unit, no propagator — just a pot of gritty compost and a certain amount of patience.

The science is elegantly simple. A hardwood cutting is dormant wood: no leaves, negligible water loss, and a decent store of carbohydrates laid down in the stem over summer. Wounding the base exposes cambium cells, which form a callus — a corky pad of undifferentiated tissue — and from that callus, root initials eventually emerge. The timing matters because you are asking the base to work while the top stays asleep. Roots are driven by auxin pooling at the wounded end; shoots are driven by warmth and cytokinins. In November the balance is stacked in your favour, because nothing above ground is in a hurry.

Seven that rarely let you down

Cornus (dogwood). The coloured-stem types — 'Midwinter Fire', 'Sibirica', the various red-barked forms — are the most obliging shrubs in the garden. Take pencil-thick stems of this year's growth, 20–30cm long, and cut the base just below a node. Thick stems benefit from a shallow slice of bark removed at the base to expose more cambium.

Salix (willow). Frankly embarrassing how easily willow roots. Any decent-length stem pushed into damp ground in November will usually take, which makes it the ideal subject for a first attempt — and for the polarity experiment below.

Ribes sanguineum (flowering currant). Slightly slower, so give it a heel: pull the cutting away from the parent stem with a sliver of older wood attached. That heel carries its own auxin and stored reserves, and it lifts the success rate noticeably.

Forsythia. The old faithful of British hedges. Straight stems, nodal cuts at the base, two-thirds buried. Roots by spring; flowers in two years if you're lucky and patient.

Philadelphus (mock orange). Same treatment as Forsythia, though it appreciates a slightly gritter mix. Take wood from the sunnier side of the bush if you have the choice — better carbohydrate reserves.

Buddleja. Wonderfully tough, and best taken with a heel from stems that flowered this summer. Don't fuss over length; 25cm is plenty.

Spiraea. Often overlooked, always reliable. Slender stems root well from nodal cuttings, and they'll sit happily in a cold frame over winter with minimal attention.

The method, in eight steps

1. Choose this year's growth — firm, fully ripened, no soft tip.
2. Cut stems 20–30cm long with clean secateurs.
3. Make a straight cut at the base, just below a node, and a slanted cut at the top, just above a bud. The slant isn't decorative: it sheds water and it tells you which way up the cutting goes.
4. Wound the base of thick-stemmed subjects with a shallow slice of bark.
5. Dip in rooting powder if you like — it helps on the slower subjects, though willow and cornus barely notice.
6. Insert two-thirds deep into a 50:50 mix of peat-free compost and grit or perlite, or into sharp sand alone. Drainage matters far more than richness.
7. Water, label, and stand the pot against a house wall or in a cold frame.
8. Leave alone until next autumn. Really. Alone.

Node, heel and wound: the three small decisions

Node position is the one people skip. Roots most readily emerge from nodal tissue, so a base cut immediately below a bud gives you the best odds. The heel matters for anything reluctant — Ribes, Buddleja, older shrubby honeysuckles — because it brings a strip of the parent's cambium and its stored resources along for the ride. Wounding matters for anything thick: a slice of bark at the base multiplies the surface area of exposed cambium, which is where callus and then roots will form.

The upside-down experiment

Here's a test you can run in a single pot, and it demonstrates something genuinely strange about plants. Cut two stems from the same willow or cornus shoot, identical in length. Plant one the right way up and one inverted, so its leafy top end is buried. Mark the pot with a cane and a bit of tape so you know which is which — you will forget otherwise.

Polarity is the principle at stake. Auxin is transported down the stem, away from the shoot tip, so it accumulates at the morphological base regardless of how you plant it. Buds, meanwhile, break according to their position in the stem, not to gravity. In practice, the inverted cutting usually either fails entirely or produces roots poorly and shoots from the buried end — occasionally pushing shoots underground, which looks as odd as it sounds. Willow, being willow, may root anyway and make you look foolish. Cornus is a better behaved demonstrator.

The wider lesson is that a cutting is not a passive stick. It is a bit of stem with a programme, and planting it upside down runs that programme backwards.

Winter and spring aftercare

The main killers are waterlogging and interference. A pot against a north-facing wall, or in an unheated cold frame, is ideal: cold enough to keep top growth in check, sheltered enough not to freeze solid for weeks. Don't feed — there are no roots to take it up and the salts will do harm. Don't tip the cuttings out in February to check on progress; every one you lift loses the fine root hairs that were just getting going.

Expect callus by late winter and roots from March onwards, depending on species. Willow and cornus may be ready to pot on by autumn 2027. Ribes and Philadelphus can take a full 18 months to make a plant worth planting out, which is the price of free shrubs.

Where it usually goes wrong

Soggy compost, cuttings planted upside down, stems taken from old wood rather than this year's growth, and impatience. Add a fifth: unlabelled pots, which turn every winter propagation project into a spring guessing game. Label in pencil, label in permanent marker, label twice.

Hardwood cuttings ask almost nothing of you. A pot, some grit, twenty minutes in the cold, and a year of leaving things alone — which, in November, is exactly the sort of gardening most of us can manage.