Good afternoon. In early 2018 my house sitter accidentally damaged my ZZ plant year before last. In the summer of 2018 I realized it probably wasn't going to recover, so after viewing some YouTube videos and reading a blog, I decided to try to keep the plant going by leaf propagation.

Following what I read and saw, I took several individual ZZ leaves and buried them each halfway in potting soil. An excruciating six months later (December 2018 ish), almost every one of them shot up a stem with a single pair of leaves. That was all the growth I saw until around January 2020, when more stems appeared with a single pair of leaves.

Is this all I can expect from leaf propagation, or at this point is it just a waiting game?

Thanks in advance!

Detach a leaf from a ZZ and remove the petiole. Make cuts on several prominent veins on the underside of the leaf. Lay the cutting, lower side down, on the medium. If the leaf curls up, hold it in place by covering the margins with rooting medium. New plants will form at each cut. A variation of this method is to cut the leaf into wedges, so that each piece has a main vein. The leaf wedge should be inserted into the media with the main vein partially covered.

I have rooted the small stems with a few leaves in water (they formed a tuber in a few weeks and once they had good roots I transferred into medium).
they do grow ultra slow, similar to what you describe: 1-2 small shoots a year. after sev years they finally produce larger stems with more leaves.
so you need to be patient.

I saw a video of somebody propagating leaves like this and thought it was probably just click bait, but worth a try. The pool noodle (or styrofoam, if you have that instead) keeps the leaflets from falling all the way in, with just the tip touching. A little tuber is supposed to form at the tip of the leaflet, where it was cut off of the main leaf stem. (They tell us each ZZ "stem" is a single leaf with leaflets - think palm leaf to compare.)
11/20/23:


2/8/24:
I tried to keep just enough water in the bowl to cover the bottom but it did dry up a few times. The white is limescale.


Soon after that pic, the original leaves were looking and feeling done so I stuck the little tubers at the base just under some soil in a pot and the original leaves soon fell off. Probably in late March. After waiting 6'ish weeks and nothing was happening, I figured nothing was going to happen and stuck some small snippings of other things in there.

Then I noticed this about a week ago. 2 little ZZ plants are coming up.



Around the same time that I put the leaves in the pot, I cut off a whole stem and stuck it in the ground. It still looks great, feels normal. Nothing new has happened, but I plan to excavate that when frost threatens to see what it has done.

ZZs are propagated by the millions the leaflet way. It's just very s-l-o-o-o-w.
Rather than using something spongy I just use perlite.
I always have a few 'Raven' leaflets rooting so if a friend admires it I can give them one.
Whole leaves root well too, and are a bit faster. Sometimes I've done that and even later then pulled leaflets off once the new plant is growing strongly.
The UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley has a ZZ plant that was collected from the wild and is now 79 years old.

Fascinating! Where is the "wild" from which it was collected?

I'm sure you do get a lot of admirers. Shiny leaves are so well loved.

I probably should have said, the slice of pool noodle doesn't get roots in it, it's just to hold the leaves and keep them floating on top of the water. The vid I saw that inspired the experiment used a block of styrofoam, but pool noodle is what was handy here.

I don't need more ZZ plants, but wanted to play with propagating them. Plants that don't provide opportunities to do something other than stare at them are less interesting to me, but I have my share of those too.

The experiment was fun for me. I will enjoy doing it again this winter. Too hot to care right now.

There is no locality data on the 1951 plant at the UCBG, but a 1963 plant came from Kenya.
Sorry for my lousy math…

Cool, thanks. : )

At this point this experiment has been going on for almost 8 months. 3 more have come up so now there are 5 successes out of 7 original leaves. 71.429%

2 at the bottom, 2 in the middle, and 1 @ upper right mostly hidden by the top fuzzy leaf.

purpleinopp said: At this point this experiment has been going on for almost 8 months. 3 more have come up so now there are 5 successes out of 7 original leaves. 71.429%

2 at the bottom, 2 in the middle, and 1 @ upper right mostly hidden by the top fuzzy leaf.

That's awesome! How deep did you plant the rhizomes?

I thought so too. So fun to watch happen, even if very slowly. And they're just so daggone cute!

They're just deep enough to be covered.

I wasn't sure if I should raise them after the leaves expire. They seem to have made the little rhizomes super fast for me compared to leaf & stem growth.

I'm pretty sure I see all 7 in that photo

I have no idea what "should" be done - you know as much about it as I do. So many people have and love ZZ plants. I'm surprised more people aren't "playing" with propagating them.

I like your wishful eyesight! Just went to check again. There really are only 5.

When you say your leaves made rhizomes super fast, how fast do you mean? Did you put yours in soil or water to get started? Pics?

I stuck the leaves in soil to half the leaf & stuck the pot in a ziplock & hung it from my shelf under lights on May 4th.

This is a photo of them taken on July 21st.



One of them had sent up a tiny stem with tiny leaves but then it 'died'.

Photo of the little stem & leaves.

That was approximately a month after putting the leaves in soil.

That looks to me in the 2nd pic like a seed sprouting that happened to be in the soil, not part of a ZZ plant.

Your happened faster than mine I think. That is awesome!! Now I want to start some both ways on the same day to compare that. Make more plants - then figure out what to do with them later... The fun never ends!!

You may be right about the seedling. Odd coloring. I wonder what it was

I'm almost tempted to dig up my green zz's but don't want to risk damaging the one sprout that finally emerged after a year of waiting.

But one of the rhizomes is at least 3 inches & it hasn't sprouted yet. There are 4 in the pot but only one has sprouted.

Potting soil can have any kind of mystery seed from wherever the gathered the stuff from.

Oh the suspense! I know what you mean about wanting to peek.

An update. I don't think these plants like this soil. Going to change it sometime in the next week.



Around the beginning of Feb I cut off a little stem & stuck it in the ground. It hasn't changed much from how it looked then.



Immediately after taking those pics today, I popped it out of the ground to see what was going on below. It had been busy making a cute little tuber.


I put it in a mushroom thing, holes added in the bottom, which is much more wide than deep.

ZZ plants are actually aroids. They are native to Eastern Africa where they grow in drought prone conditions, mainly in sand.
I have this variegated one, it almost died, I had it out on the porch during the rainy season and it got too wet. I caught it in time, unpotted it, hacked off the rot and treated with Captan, repotted and took it indoors. Its made a full recovery, even replaced a stem but initially lost like 3 stems.
I'm going to prop a few leaves off this now. I have 2 semi-aquatic terraria set up, for my Cyrtospermas...overwintering them in the house this year to see if I cannot keep them from going dormant like they do in the greenhouse pond every year (water gets too chilly out there) so I have grow lights set up on those and aquarium heaters keeping the water 75F.
My plan is to put the props in the terraria (not in the water of course) where its warm and somewhat humid to get them going then transfer them out into the main house