Review History
Restoring South African subtropical succulent thicket using Portulacaria afra: root growth of cuttings differs depending on the harvest site during a drought

The revised manuscript (including analyses and graphs) carefully addresses the concerns raised by reviewers. I have two minor comments as follows:

L 30 “after 35, 42, 48, 56, and 103 days after” – remove one “after”

L 73 “with no consideration of the condition of the source material used” – you might consider rewording slightly to avoid offense to your hard-working restoration practitioners. I imagine that practitioners do select the healthy-looking cuttings whenever they can be found, while avoiding wasting time on harvesting dead or nearly dead cuttings.

[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Julin Maloof, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]

The reviewers have pointed out various concerns that will need to be addressed in a revised manuscript. From my own reading and based on reviewer feedback, I have two general comments:

1) Additional details are needed regarding methodology and justification for the chosen methodologies.

2) For reasons explained below, I think the wording of the conclusions needs to be revisited.

Methods – I think stem diameter should be used as a factor or covariate in your statistical model. You already measured these values, so it would be simple to add them to the model as a potential explanatory factor.

Planting – the “garden” needs to be described in more detail. In many readers’ minds, a garden is an outdoor area, but you used the word “enclosure” – what does that mean or look like?

Were cuttings watered after planting? Was the soil wet at the time of planting? What type of soil was used? The watering question is especially important since soil water can strongly influence establishment success and root growth, so your experiment is not repeatable without this information. Would cuttings experience a similar water regime during a restoration outplanting project? If not, how are your findings relevant to restoration outplanting?

Figure 1 – Why are these data presented? How were they used? The figure caption refers of sub-figures A) and B) but there is only one figure and no A) or B) shown on the figure.

Figure 2 – I doubt if the tiny light-colored fonts on the Google map and elevation map (x and y axes and top labeling) will be legible if this image is embedded in a formatted publication or web page. Can the authors improve this map by using fonts based on vector graphics rather than grainy pixels, or by using larger fonts or brighter white colored fonts (especially x and y axes of the elevation graph)?

Figure 3 – site 6 and site 10 had the highest leaf water and in figure 3 it is clear that these two sites both also had the highest % rooting and lowest variation in % rooting. This does support a role of leaf water in ensuring high % rooting and ensuring high consistency in % rooting. While reporting statistical patterns is important, visual patterns should be discussed especially when they support a hypothesis. Statistical patterns are a function of sample size and variability within samples across the entire experiment. ANOVA assumes constant variance across treatments, which is obviously false here; P-values alone from ANOVA should not be strongly relied upon to make decisions on the importance of factors / treatments. One could also consider fancier statistical models that assume different variances among treatments / factors).
Figure 3 – How is it possible for the % rooting (n= 6) to fluctuate up and down over time? Is it because one or more plant died? This should be explained in the caption. I think the % rooting curves would be better conveyed as monotonically increasing functions (as you would do for e.g. % seed germination over time).

Figure S2 – looking at the situation after 36 days we see a visual pattern where the four lowest leaf water sites (sites 1-4) tend to have lower root mass than the three highest leaf water sites (sites 6,9,10). The fact that the pattern becomes more obscured over time is not surprising because plants that have established roots will grow based on local conditions in the garden rather than based on their water status more than 30 days earlier. I would have liked to see data on root growth in relation to leaf water within 7-14 days after planting the cuttings. I would expect to see a stronger pattern. Can this be discussed in Discussion?

The authors conclude that “parent-plant identity can have an overriding influence on experimental results”; however, looking at the data (i.e. Figure 4), I am not convinced of an over-riding or even a substantial importance of individual parent plants in determining success. The graphs do not show error bars for parental plant means, but it is essential to see those error bars in order to understand the degree of within-plant versus among-plant variation at each site. I suspect error bars would be overlapping among many parental plants and in most cases, plotting a 95% confidence would show no difference among most pairs of parental plants at a site. I’m not suggesting that there are no cases of parental plants differs, but I don’t think you have made a convincing case that there is a general “overriding” effect of parental plant across this experiment. If you use the strong term “overriding” or something similar to make a generalization of patterns, please provide additional support or justification.

**PeerJ Staff Note:** Please ensure that all review, editorial, and staff comments are addressed in a response letter and that any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate.