How Cuttings become Trees
How do you cut off the tip of a branch and turn it into a tree with the same DNA? Cloning a coast redwood is as easy as following a recipe. If you want to grow a new redwood tree, you can either plant a redwood seed or you can take a vegetative cutting from an existing redwood and create a clone of the tree from which the cutting was taken. You might think it would be much easier to grow a redwood from seed than from a cutting. But the reverse happens to be true. It is much easier and faster to grow a cloned redwood than it is to grow one from seed.
A simple recipe for cloning a redwood tree by using vegetative cuttings was given to me by Johan Schorer, Senior Propagator for the Seattle Parks Greenhouse.