How To Divide Rohdea - Japanese Sacred Lily

How To Divide Rohdea - Japanese Sacred Lily

with Tony Avent

By Published September 06, 2022

Shop for Rohdea at Plant Delights Nursery

Dividing rohdea is easier than you may think. Join Plant Delights Nursery founder Tony Avent as he shows how you can divide rohdea easily at home and add more interest to your woodland garden.

Video Transcription

Okay, today we're out in the garden dividing rohdeas. And rohdeas, for [those] that don't know, is an Asian plant, very highly prized in Japan. It's a woodland plant. The beauty of it is, here we are in the middle of January and it's beautifully evergreen. Now rohdeas are never something that's going to be expensive because they're not very fast-growing. We're going to show you a little secret of how we propagate them, and it'll speed things up once you have your first one and allow you to just spread it around or share it with friends.

So, here's the plant. We're going to come in and dig it out of the ground. We're going to use our little trusty tool to pop it out. Okay. Okay, and in the case of this one, we've got two on there so these are actually very simple. They generally will just pull right out from each other. So, we got all, immediately have two and you can already see we've got a new one forming there at the base. But the very interesting thing about the rohdeas is they form a long rhizome underground. This is a piece of the rhizome that is left as it grew. We're going to actually take that and cut that off. So now you have one plant, and this will become another plant and often this will send up even more than one. Let's do one more. Let's get one that's a little bigger here. And you do not need to be gentle. I think folks often are much too gentle with their plants. Alright, so here's our first one, we don't have anything we can cut off of that. So, we've got one. Alright so here we've got two together and you see how they're split. We're going to come in first thing either do this with clippers or with scissors. Let's get that leaf out of the way. I'm going to cut it back as close as we can to the base where we still have roots. Okay, so there we go. We got a plant full of roots. So out of that one clump we've already got two and then we got number three. Well, we don't just have number three because we're going to go in here and cut right here.

Okay so there's number three and then I've still got this piece. So, this we can either plant like this, or we can cut further. We can go into this piece and actually cut that in half. So now at a one clump we have five plants. As a nurseryman, we start with one plant first time we divide it and that's probably going to be after two to three years in the ground we've got five. Another two to three in the ground and we divide again, and we get 25. And then the third division, we're up to a 125. So, if we can wait that long, and [with] this, you're talking six to ten years, you can actually have a hundred from buying just one.

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