Since buying a Million Bells plant at the local Walmart, I've finally had a chance to study up on the difference between prohibited and proprietary plants. If a plant is patented, it is not legal to propagate it and sell clones for a period of twenty years. If it is trademarked, then it is not legal to use the name.
The acronym PBR stands for Plant Breeders Rights, a factoid I learned here:
When I looked at a plant such as the calibrachoa and learnd the history of how it was created from wild mountain petunias and trademarked, I became more sympathetic to the grower's efforts to keep the plant proprietary, but I think that when people talk about propagation being prohibited they need to be a little clearer about the fact that
home gardeners who buy a protected plant are allowed to reproduce
it from cuttings for their own use. It is just giving it away or
selling it that is discouraged, or in the case of the Million Bells, violating the trademark.
That said, here is the first Calibrachoa cutting that I rooted:
I put a cutting about 1 1/2" long into open cell (A/C) foam on June 23 in the grow hole of an AeroGarden 3, and got this amount of rooting by August 1. It was not possible to find a stem to cut that did not have flowers and buds, so I left these on to look pretty in the AG while the roots formed. In theory the clone would have rooted faster had I cut them off.
Here is what that cutting looked like one month later:
Here is a new one I'm starting in a 10 ml vlass vial (the leaf in front is from a Thai Basil cutting:
I blogged about this experiment here and here
