You evidently didn't find out why cottonwoods are not good trees for your yard. They are very weak wooded and prone to breakage, especially in the kind of regular spring t-storms you get there in TN. They are also short lived compared with other more commonly planted trees. They produce this cotton-like material (Seeds actually) that gets all over everything. People have even reported it getting into AC condensers and starting a fire. And last but not least they are rather lacking in the ornamental features department. If you're going to plant a cottonwood in a suburban environment like that, you need to be putting away about $20 a month into an interest bearing account for each tree so that in 15-20 years when you need to call out a tree service to pay for the removal, you'll be prepared. These are water loving trees. They will do poorly in the south in the heat and drought if not anywhere near a water source. It's not going to look full and beautiful like the pictures you see on the internet. Also don't bother with ammending your soil and all of that. Lots of trees, particularly the ones I mentioned do just fine in clay in the sun.

I have several suggestions: First, can you find some young trees, get a pole pruner, and snip off some faster growing twigs from young trees? If you drive around a while maybe you can find some and the owner will allow you to take some snips from their trees. I have never rooted poplar cuttings from those like yours. I think they will work, but they are not the best. But I want you to continue with the cuttings you have and let me know how they perform. There is a really big old cottonwood here that I would like to propagate, but I couldn't get any better cuttings than what you have now. You can let me know how any similar cuttings I might get will do. If you have a terminal bud, that's just fine--it doesn't matter. But make sure you remove all the others and put all but about 1 to 1 1/2 inches of the cutting under the soil--more is better. Most of the twig becomes in effect a taproot. As for selecting/determining the sex of your cuttings. I would take cuttings from several trees, carefully label them as to what tree they came from, and then check the catkins on those trees later. If you plant a bunch together (at least 6 inches apart and all labelled) then when the catkins emerge on the parent trees, you can see which were male, and remove the females. Your soil: if they will grow in the soil they will root in it. These things root w/o any difficulty whatsoever. I never misted anything and never really did any extra watering over what I would give any planted tree. If you dig up and condition the soil like I describe, they should root just fine. If there is a little extra topsoil you can add to the mix, that may help. If the soil is really hard clay, that is not good. I rooted all my poplars, about 18, three years ago, in a clay loam soil and had 100% success. Poplars really want to root themselves and I think it would be hard to stop them. "Heavy clay" can mean different things to different people. I wonder if you dug into my soil you would call it heavy clay. It has a lot of clay in it, and is very sticky, especially in some places, but it is good for trees. One extra difficulty with planting them out after first rooting them in another medium: the new roots on these cuttings are really very stringy, and when you plant them out, the roots are difficult to manage--they just flop and tangle themselves and are hard to spread out. If you root them where they will eventually grow, they will start out with their roots arranged perfectly, just as the tree wants them. And if the soil is heavy clay, the roots will have more difficulty adapting themselves to the new site than they would if they rooted there originally. Another idea--I went through my North American Trees by Jacobson, and he lists and describes a few cultivars. You can still go that route, or do both--cuttings and ordering a good male cultivar, if you can find someone who has them. You can grow more than one tree for a while and later select what you want to keep. --Spruce

Ken can be "hostal" to trees sometimes, especially maples! Anyway, I appreciate the fact that trees can be a hazard next to "life" and property. Compared to Ken, I am relatively comfortable with tall trees near my house, although right now I don't have any. But if a really bad storm comes up, then there is some risk with almost any tree. The approach I would take would be to have any very large tree next to and over my house inspected periodically, and have any suspect, weak limbs removed. The plusses of having a large tree next to a house are the shade, the sound of rain in the leaves, etc. A minus is leaves in the gutters/downspouts. As for cottonwoods: I didn't mean to suggest that their limbs can't break in storms, but based on my own observations, they don't have any special tendency to break in storms compared to most trees. And an issue is how and where they might break. Some of the trees that have a reputation for being fairly strong can break in catastrophic ways, such as the splitting of large branches away from the trunk, as with sugar maple and red oak, etc. I can't remember seeing that kind of breakage on a cottonwood, although I can't say it doesn't happen sometimes. My neighbor has a large cottonwood that he loves. This last year several large limbs were broken in a storm, but they did not split away from the trunk--they broke in the middle. BUT, and here is an illustration of my main point--these branches broke when a large black locust was uprooted and crashed through a portion of the crown of the cottonwood tree. If that had not happened, the cottonwood would have been unscathed by the storm. I got 8 beautiful 8' long locust posts out of this tree! --Spruce

I forgot exactly how fast it was growing earlier, it actually grows a half a inch a day but now it is in a "drought dormancy" because I have not watered in a while so it is currently not growing, and it has also lost some bottom leaves and has formed a temporary bud to conserve water because of the drought. If I water it some more it should come out of it. You can see we have the worst drought in the U.S. here in the southeast which we have had since spring And I over estimated its height, it is actually just over 4 feet tall. We have about 30 more days of growing season left before trees will start to go dormant for winter. So if I keep it watered it should reach over 5 feet by autumn. Eastern cottonwood trees have been known to grow 1.5 inches a day and maybe even 2 inches a day in superb conditions during the heat of the summer. They have been know to grow 16 feet in one year or one growing season. It has no branches yet but it should by next year. This cottonwood is a female and that's why I planted it in the woods where it will be great to view the yearly "snow" :) I'm planning on getting some cuttings of a old huge male cottonwood tree this spring to plant next to our yard in a tilled and mulched area 10 feet wide. It's going to be planted 40 feet out to give room for the huge burst of growth :-D so we can have a quick shade tree in 5 to 10 years in our barren yard plus many other tree types I'm going to plant in the yard from oaks to maples. How it currently looks today: Some of the leaves were huge, a couple of them were 12 inches long. Temporary bud it has formed because of the drought: