If your question had an easy answer (fix) a lot of people would be very happy! I don't know why maples or other trees are hard to reproduce from cuttings (some are easier than others), aside from 'genetics', or why some plants only will grow if e.g. a leaf is laid on the soil vs the stem being stuck in a water glass, but I suppose it's what makes life interesting. There is probably a highy technical answer somewhere, and maybe someone else can tell you what it is. I would guess that hybrids that come true may be ones in which the dominant genes were passed along in the hybridization, but other than that???

Thanks, Lucy. I'll cross post to the tree forum. Somebody out there in cyberspace should be able to give me generalities even if there are not hard rules. Betty

Generally speaking, everything that we would reproduce vegetatively, from cuttings, layerings ..., will come true. They will be exact genetic duplicates of the plant material from which they came. Even when grafting to understock, the graft will be true to the material from which it came.

In the case of the laceleaf maple - if you were able to reproduce it from cuttings (varyingly difficult by cultivar) or by layering, it would still be true to the parent material. It is grafted to rootstock for a number of reasons, two of which relate to hardiness issues and difficulty in clonal reproduction by cuttings.

Hybridizing is the process of creating new varieties from already established plants by fertilizing one plant with pollen taken from another. This action is called a 'cross'. The resulting hybrid (cross) is the product of the seed produced in the seed-bearing (mother) plant and will contain varying degrees of the attributes of both parents, yet is recognizably different from each.

Only seeds from cross pollination of developed pure strains of plants will come true from seed, and only for that generation.

Al