 Plant cutting

A plant cutting is a detached piece of a plant, such as part of a plant stem, leaf or root system, used to produce another plant by vegetative reproduction. A stem cutting must maintain a living shoot while forming new adventitious roots. Because this bypasses meiosis and fertilization, it can preserve the parental genotype, apart from mutations and pre-existing variation within the parent.

A practical example is a soft young shoot cut below a node, with lower leaves removed and its base placed in a moist, aerated medium. High humidity reduces water loss before the new root system can supply it; aeration avoids treating a rootless cutting as if it were an established waterlogged plant. The balance illustrates a physiological bottleneck: living leaves need water immediately, whereas a functional root system takes time to develop.^[ref]