'Purple Haze' looks like one we will all want!
Paul S wrote: I take cuttings most years but have yet to manage to get one to strike.
Basal soft wood cuttings [we used to call them 'Irishman's cuttings', I don't know why. I'm sure we don't call them that anymore!] were often successful but did need bottom heat. Side shoots from below the flowers sometimes worked [according to my tutor at Duchy College]. Hardwood seldom strike. It does layer though.
Christopher Lloyd [Foliage Plants] growing it as an herbaceous perennial wrote;
'Cuttings can be taken from the fleshy terminal shoots on strongly growing plants, made in August or September, but this does spoil the look of the plants from which they were taken. You can very often find some shoots from low down, even from below ground level, appearing in the autumn, and these make first rate cutting material.'
In his later 'Garden Flowers' he recommends taking basal cutting of new growth 'from below ground level'.
I have lodged in my memory but without a clear source, that I was told to plant it 'sideways' [horizontally] so that there was a significant section of stem below the frost line. In the Lloyd books he recommends bringing it in for the winter as not fully hardy in his earlier books, and then leaving it out with a mulch in his later work. He comments that in Cornwall stems may overwinter to flower in their second year. Am I right that if not cut down by man it now usually flowers on old wood even in England?
Chad
Melianthus Major by Andy Cowlishaw, on Flickr