Can you grow a whole new plant from a single cut stem? You snip four healthy stems from a geranium and place them in jars of distilled water set in direct sunlight. Within 10 to 14 days, small adventitious roots — roots that sprout from a stem instead of the normal root system — appear on the cut ends. When the roots are established, you transfer the cuttings to pots with soil. The potted stems look just like the original parent plant. This process is called fragmentation, a type of vegetative propagation that grows a new plant from a non-seed part of the parent.

Plants do not always need seeds to reproduce. Vegetative propagation offers three methods: leaf cutting, stem cutting, and layering. With a leaf cutting, you remove a leaf with its stem and place it in moist soil or water. A stem cutting uses a short piece of stem with a few nodes, rooted in soil. Layering bends a low stem to the ground and buries a wounded section until roots form. You pick two of these methods, test them on the same plant, and compare which one produces roots faster — revealing which approach to growing a new plant from the parent works best.