Propagation of Lachenalia cultivars from leaf cuttings

Lachenalia is a poorly known genus of ornamental bulbous plants from South Africa with a huge floricultural potential. The paper discusses in vivo multiplication with leaf cuttings of Lachenalia cv. ‘Namakwa’, ‘Romaud’, ‘Ronina’ and ‘Rupert’. Mature leaves were collected from non-flowering donor plants. Each leaf was halved to make proximal and distal leaf cuttings. ‘Ronina’ distal leaf cuttings produced the lowest number of bulblets (5.7 per cutting), while ‘Namakwa’ proximal leaf cuttings turned out the most productive (10.5 bulblets per cutting). The bulblets produced by cv. ‘Namakwa’ distal leaf cuttings were the lightest (0.3 g per bulblet), and those formed on cv. ‘Ronina’ proximal leaf cuttings were the heaviest (0.9 g per bulblet). In general, the weight of individual bulblets ranged from 0.1 to 1.2 g. Irrespective of the cutting type, the leaves of cv. ‘Namakwa’ produced the greatest number of bulblets, and the leaves of ‘Ronina’ yielded the heaviest bulblets. With no dependence on their genotype, proximal leaf cuttings were advantageous in terms of total number of generated bulblets and their quality (weight, diameter).