I mainly use Jiffy pellets the last few years to do rhizomatous begonias by leaf wedges. Canes cannot be started by a leaf though. Some Asian species cane-looking begonias can be started by a leaf such as brevirimosa and amphioxus. I started six Silver Queen wedges (one leaf) in Mid-November and this is what they looked like two weeks ago. I think 3 starters would be ample for this 10 inch pot. I started Mrs. Ludwig early this month and this shows some with roots two weeks later. I now have two that have put out tiny leaves. The green ones are not Mrs Ludwig and neither are the two on the right front row. The stem is Janet Brown which fell off so I saw a dormant bud and am trying to get a new plant out of it. canes are easily water rooted or stuck in soil and watered lightly. This is the pot of canes from above 3 months later.

the answer to your first question is preference, i think. i've left plantlets to grow together into a larger clump and it IS a lot more attractive. for the second question, i usually just leave the mother leaf to wither away, but you can also trim it down when you get a healthy sized plantlet. -ming

Well--all begonias aren't the same, and I don't know of any begonias that are annuals. Some are grown as annuals, or as cut flowers more or less, to throw away when people get tired of them or don't know how to grow them for longer periods, but so far as I know none are annuals. As far as growing rexes outdoors, while your conditions are somewhat different from mine I would think you could grow them outside just fine after frost chances are over, as you say; I grow most of mine outdoors. Be sure they're in shade and in a cooler part of the yard--they don't care much for heat. If you're interested in learning about the different kinds of begonias, check out the AMerican Begonia site. Too few of us get to see all the different kinds. They just aren't available most places, and it bothers me that the ones that tend to be most often available are often the ones that are more challenging to grow. I guess a lot of people in the business go by the motto of someone local, who fortunately isn't in the business anymore. He said sell people plants that will die so they'll have to come back for more. I think he went a long ways to convincing a lot of people they had 'black thumbs.'

Thanks so much for your postings, everyone! I would like to try propagating from leaves that I saved from the stem cuttings...for insurance. Yesterday, a friend gave me a stem broken from a begonia I have admired since I first saw it in bloom a few years ago. He said I could probably get about 3 stem cuttings from it, which we did. We cut all the leaves off, leaving a small triangle of leaf on each petiole. We dipped the stem cuttings in rooting hormone, tapped off the excess, and stuck them in a pot of dampened perlite. We placed the pot in indirect light with a ziploc bag over the top. The pot had too little perlite for my liking (approximately 1", but it was very late at night...too late to get some from the shed...so my husband said it will have to do ("the roots will grow laterally", he says.) Today, we added some fresh perlite to the pot to bring the level up. I'm skeptical about the success of these stem cuttings. I'm not sure of the name of this plant...my friend only refers to it as "Ann's mother's plant". He propagated it from that plant many years ago. I haven't been able to figure out which subgroup it belongs to. Maybe it's cane-stemmed...but its leaves aren't assymetrical or deeply toothed to lobed, as cane-stemmed begonias usually are. Its leaves are green angel wings with white speckling, are smooth as silk but not shiny, and can be as large as 10" in length! My friend grows the plant tall and upright with supports, but the large clusters of deep red flowers are pendulous. So maybe it's a rex-cultorum and my friend just keeps it tall? His plants are probably 7 to 8 feet tall! If anyone can identify this plant, I would be interested to know what you think it might be. Thanks again for your help on leaf cuttings. Since I no longer have the stems attached to the leaves, I will try some leaf cuttings in water and some with scoring on underside of leaf at mid-vein/mid-rib pinned flat to vermiculite. (I kept the leaves in a platic bag.) Hoping for success!