Introduction

Coralbells sport airy flower spikes on wiry stems above low-growing, often dramatic foliage. Varieties with variegated or dark purple leaves make stunning ground covers, and the delicate flower spikes won't obscure the plants behind them, making them a good choice for the front of the border. Another common name is alum root.

Heuchera Propagation by Leaf Cuttings

Heuchera from leaf cuttings.

Note: Some plants are patented. Please check to see that the variety of plant you are taking cuttings from is not covered by these patents. This information can be obtained from USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

If it is a newer heuchera introduction, it is probably patented. Some of these varieties will hit the patent websites in a matter of a few weeks or can take a couple of years.

  1. Cuttings can be taken any time of year, however they do better in the Spring when it is cooler. This gives both the mother plant and the new baby plant time to recover and become established before Winter.

  2. When removing the leaf cuttings from the mother plant, make sure you find the stem/petiole of the heuchera. It is critical to include this part in your cutting.

  3. Remove leaf cuttings with a sharp knife, ensuring part of the stem is included in the cuttings.

  4. Dip leaf cutting into a rooting hormone, tapping off any excess.

  5. Plant leaf cuttings into a moistened mix of 50/50 perlite and peat moss. 'Tent' a clear plastic bag over the cutting, using wooden skewers to keep the plastic off the leaf cutting. Place pot and bag in a shaded area, ensuring cutting receives light, but not direct sunlight.

  6. Check cuttings daily to make sure they do not dry out or mold and stay moist. In about 6-8 weeks, roots should start to form. A gentle tug on the cuttings will let you know when roots have started to form.

  7. To ensure there are enough roots on the cuttings, wait several weeks after roots have started to form prior to starting process for hardening off cuttings. When completely hardened off, plant out in garden.

I had some discussions with Terra Nova Nurseries regarding this topic. They informed me that the new plants from this type of propagation will not grow very large as this type of propagation does not include any leaf buds. This makes these new smaller plants ideal for containers or to tuck into a small spot in your garden.

Thumb of 2011-12-28/Carolyn22/00bbb2

About coral bells

Most coralbells sport clouds of tiny, bell-shaped pink, coral, red, or white flowers in late spring or early summer. However, varieties grown primarily for their foliage may have insignificant blooms. Foliage colors include red, purple, silver, as well as green, and some varieties sport marbled or patterned leaves. Foliage height ranges from 6 to 18 inches; flower spikes can reach 24 inches tall.

Special features of coral bells

Easy care/low maintenance

Unusual foliage

Good for cut flowers

Attracts hummingbirds

Ongoing Care

Remove dead foliage in early spring, then apply a thin layer of compost, followed by a 2-inch layer of mulch to retain moisture and control weeds. Water plants during the summer if rainfall is less than 1 inch per week. Cut back flower stalks after blooms fade. Divide plants in early spring every three or four years or when the stems become woody or the plant falls open at the center. Lift plants, divide the rootball into clumps, and replant.

Choosing a site to grow coral bells

Select a site with full sun to light shade and well-drained soil. In areas with hot summers, light shade is preferred.

Planting Instructions

Plant in spring or fall, spacing plants 1 to 2 feet apart depending on the variety. Prepare the garden bed by using a garden fork or tiller to loosen soil to a depth of 12 to 15 inches, then mix in a 2- to 4-inch layer of compost. Dig a hole twice the diameter of the plant's container. Carefully remove the plant from its pot and place it in the hole so the top of the rootball is level with the soil surface. Carefully fill in around the rootball and firm the soil gently. Water thoroughly.

Frequently Asked Questions about Coral Bells

The leaf edges on my new coral bells are turning brown and crisping. What is causing it?

Browning that starts at the margins is the plant telling you that water is not reaching the edges of the leaves, and there are five quite different reasons that happens. The order to check them in matters, because one of them is not a cultural problem at all.

First, the likeliest one on a recently planted clump. A plant lifted from a nursery pot is still drawing on the small block of medium it arrived in, and until roots move out into your soil it dries out much faster than the ground around it suggests. Feel the original root ball itself, not the soil beside it, and water onto the ball as well as around it for the first several weeks. New leaves produced after establishment come clean; the marked ones do not recover, which is normal.

Second, and this is the one people miss on this plant in particular, is soil that is too wet. Coral bells are woodland edge plants adapted to sharply drained, humus rich soil. In a bed that stays moist, the fine roots die from lack of air, and a plant with damaged roots shows exactly the same scorched margins as a plant that is short of water, because in both cases water is not arriving. If your bed holds moisture and the leaves are browning, more water is the wrong instinct. Dig a hole a foot deep, fill it, let it empty, fill it again, and if the second filling is still there hours later you have a drainage problem to solve before anything else.

Third, sun and heat. Not every one of these plants wants the same exposure. The old fashioned kinds grown for red flowers and the fine silvery patterned ones scorch readily in afternoon sun and humid heat. The tougher hybrids bred from the hairy leaved American species take considerably more sun and far more humidity. In the South, morning sun with afternoon shade suits nearly all of them; in cool northern gardens most will take most of a day of sun. If the browning is on the side facing the afternoon, that is your answer.

Fourth, fertilizer and salts. Too much fertilizer, or fertilizer placed against the crown, burns leaf margins in the same pattern. So does the salty runoff from a path or drive that is treated in winter.

Fifth, and this is the one that is not a cultural problem. Foliar nematodes are microscopic roundworms that live inside the leaf, and they produce dark brown or purplish patches that are sharply squared off by the leaf veins rather than fading gradually, usually starting on the lowest leaves. They spread in films of water, so overhead watering carries them from leaf to leaf and plant to plant. There is no home treatment. Infested plants should be lifted and put in the trash rather than the compost heap, the ground left unplanted with susceptible plants for a season, and watering switched to the soil surface. It is worth knowing about because it is often nursed along for years as a mystery, and the plant next door catches it.

A sixth check that takes two minutes: take hold of the crown and lift gently. A plant whose roots have been eaten comes up in your hand with almost no resistance. That is vine weevil, and the next answer deals with it.

Something is eating my potted coral bells and there are small brown deposits on the soil. Should I put slug pellets down?

Please do not put pellets down on a guess. Two of the three clues here point away from slugs, one of them points somewhere quite specific, and preventive pesticide use in a pot on a patio is exactly the habit worth breaking.

Read the evidence you already have. Small brown cylindrical pellets sitting on the surface are droppings: chewing caterpillars and similar larvae produce them, and the fact that they accumulate under the damage is the giveaway. Vine weevil grubs live down in the potting mix eating roots and leave nothing on the surface, so the deposits are not evidence of them. No slime trails is meaningful but not conclusive, since trails dry and disappear and are hard to see on potting mix; slug and snail damage is usually ragged holes in the middle of leaves as well as at the edges, often worst after rain. Notches bitten out of the leaf margins in neat semicircles are the signature of adult vine weevils, and that matters because it changes where you look.

Here is the correction that saves you disturbing your plants again. If vine weevil is doing the leaf damage, it is the adults doing it, and they are not in the pot. They are flat black, slow, flightless beetles about a quarter of an inch long that hide by day and feed after dark. Digging around the roots looking for grubs is the wrong test for leaf notching, and it sets young plants back. The right test is a flashlight after dark, an hour or two after sunset, looking at the leaf edges and the rim of the pot. The same trip will settle whether it is caterpillars or slugs.

Turning the plant out of the pot is still worth doing once, but for a different reason: to check whether the roots are being eaten. Vine weevil grubs are plump, white, legless, curved, with a distinct pale brown head, and they show up against dark potting mix immediately. Coral bells are one of their favorite hosts, and container plants are where they do the most damage. If you find them, wash all the old mix off the roots, dispose of it in the trash rather than on the garden or the compost heap, and repot into fresh mix.

On the treatments that come up:

  • Slug pellets. Baits based on metaldehyde are a severe poisoning hazard to dogs and a risk to wildlife. Where a bait is genuinely needed, use one based on iron phosphate, scattered thinly as the label directs rather than heaped, and keep the container closed and away from children and pets. Better still, use the beer trap, the evening patrol and the removal of daytime hiding places, which cost nothing and target the actual animal.
  • Diatomaceous earth. It has a narrow real use and it is oversold. It works only while it is completely dry, so the first watering or shower finishes it, and mixing it into moist potting mix achieves nothing at all against grubs. "Food grade" describes its purity, not its safety to breathe: the dust is an irritant to lungs and eyes, so wear a mask and goggles if you use it. It is also indiscriminate, and kills the ground beetles and other predators that are on your side.
  • What actually works on vine weevil grubs is a biological control. Parasitic nematodes, sold as a powder to be mixed with water and drenched into the pot, are the standard answer. Apply them when the mix is moist and warm enough, which in practice means late summer to early fall, with a second chance in spring, and follow the temperature guidance on the pack because they are living organisms with an expiration date. Repotting into fresh mix at the same time removes most of the population by hand.
  • For caterpillars, hand picking after dark handles small numbers on a few pots. If you want a product, a Bacillus thuringiensis preparation is the low risk choice, with the honest limits that it must be eaten by a young caterpillar to work, it needs the label to name ornamental plants and caterpillars, and sunlight degrades it so it needs repeating.

One note on propagating while you are at it. Coral bells root more reliably from the short rosettes taken off the sides of a plant with a sliver of woody stem attached than from ordinary stem cuttings, which is essentially the same operation as dividing an older clump. Four out of five young plants surviving into fall is a good first attempt. Keep them in their pots through the first winter somewhere sheltered but not warm, since a young rooted rosette is far more likely to be lost to winter wet than to cold.

Two plants went limp within two weeks of planting, and one is losing its lower leaves. What should I do?

Wilting a week or two after planting is usually establishment shock and passes. Wilting that gets worse while the lower leaves die off is a different thing, and the way to tell them apart is to look at the crown.

Lift the failing plant and inspect. Firm, pale, branching roots and a solid crown means shock, and the plant will come back. A crown that is brown and soft in the center, that smells stale, or that pulls apart from the roots, is rot, and no amount of care will reverse it. Rot in a moist bed on this plant is common, and it is what the lower leaves dying is usually announcing. If one plant has rotted and the other has not, the difference is almost always a few inches of drainage, or how deep each was set.

On planting depth, which is where most of these losses begin: set the plant so the crown, the point where the leaf stalks emerge, sits right at the soil surface. Buried a little, it rots. Sitting proud, the roots dry out and the plant works its way further out of the ground. This plant has a particular habit worth knowing: it builds a short woody stem over two or three years and gradually lifts itself out of the soil, so that an established clump ends up sitting on a knuckle of bare woody crown with the leaves in a rosette on top. That is the point to lift and divide it, cutting the old woody part away and replanting the young rosettes with their crowns back at soil level. Winter frost heaving accelerates it, so check your plants in early spring and firm back anything that has lifted.

When you plant them out: improve the bed rather than the hole, working compost or leaf mold through a wide area, and if the ground is heavy or holds water, plant into a raised bed or a low mound instead, because sharp drainage matters more to this plant than fertility does. For a container grown plant, skip the old trick of mounding up a cone to drape the roots over; that technique belongs to bare root plants. Tease out any circling roots, set the ball at the right depth, backfill with the soil you dug out and settle it in with water rather than by treading it firm. Water deeply, then let the top inch dry before watering again. Mulch lightly and keep it off the crown, since mulch piled against a coral bells crown is one of the reliable ways to rot one. And expect several weeks of looking miserable: drooping and a few lost lower leaves during establishment are normal in a plant that has left most of its root system behind.

I planted three coral bells a month ago and none has flowered. Why not?

Probably nothing is wrong. But "be patient" is only half an answer, and the missing half is which plants you actually bought and when they bloom.

Three things determine whether you get flowers this year. The kind of plant comes first: these fall into two broad groups. The older sorts grown for their flowers throw up tall wands of small red or pink bells and bloom heavily in late spring and early summer. The modern ones bred for colored foliage, the ambers, purples, limes and caramels that fill garden centers, were selected for leaves, and many of them flower sparsely, briefly, or with rather insignificant spikes. If yours is one of the foliage sorts, a season without much bloom is the plant behaving normally. Second, the season you planted in: a plant put in during high summer has missed the main flowering window for the year, and a first year plant is also spending everything it has on roots, which is exactly what you want it to do. Third, light: too much shade reduces flowering markedly, though a spot described as mostly sunny is not the reason for no flowers, and in a hot climate it is more likely to be a problem for the leaves than for the blooms.

What to do this season and next: leave them alone and water them consistently through the first summer, letting the surface dry between waterings. Do not feed heavily; a high nitrogen feed produces a bigger, softer plant with fewer flowers, and soft growth is more prone to rot. A light topdressing of compost in spring is plenty. Cut the flower stems out at the base once they fade, which tidies the plant and, on the free flowering kinds, often brings a second lighter flush. Judge them next June, not this August. If an established plant in reasonable light still refuses to flower after a full season, it is a foliage variety and that is simply what it does.

One small pleasure worth knowing about: the flower spikes are a hummingbird plant, which is a good reason to choose one of the free flowering kinds if you have the choice. And for households with animals, coral bells are not listed among the plants toxic to cats and dogs, so a nibbled leaf is a gardening problem rather than a veterinary one.

Something broke my coral bells off. Will the plant grow back?

It depends entirely on what broke, so look at the base of the plant before worrying. Coral bells carry their flowers on tall, wiry stems that rise well above a low mound of leaves, and those stems snap easily underfoot or in wind.

If only the flower stem went, the plant is essentially unharmed. You have lost that spike, a second one may follow later in the same season, and next year's bloom is not affected at all. This is the same cut you would make yourself when removing spent flower stalks, so treat it as accidental deadheading and carry on.

The serious case is damage to the crown, meaning the tight cluster of leaves and short stems at soil level where the roots meet the top growth. If that has been crushed or torn away and only roots are left, recovery is genuinely uncertain, because the buds that produce new leaves sit in the crown. Even so, it is worth replanting what remains. Set it back at the same depth with the crown level with the soil surface, keep it evenly moist and out of hot afternoon sun while it tries to recover, and give it the rest of the season before deciding. Coral bells are tougher than they look and often come back from very little.

While you are down there, check whether the crown is sitting proud of the soil. Coral bells tend to push themselves upward as the woody base ages, which loosens their footing and makes them easy to knock out of the ground. If yours has lifted, that is the moment to divide it or replant it deeper, as described in the care section above.