Not horrible at all and is a very common commercial practice. The result is a sturdy tree which will come to bloom much earlier than a seed grown specimen.

Alright, one the experts has arrived! Thanks, rhizo. It seemed preposterous to me when I read it.

So the fraxinus root stock doesn't thicken up at a different rate than the fringetree scion over time?

How did this come about anyways? Was some grafter/gardener experimenting with shrooms that led to a drug induced epiphany?

John

This post was edited by j0nd03 on Tue, Apr 30, 13 at 17:16

I would love to have been present when the first experiments with grafting began. That was around 4000 years ago, though. Grafting has been a staple of woody plant culture for eons. China was the place and who knows what the inspiration was! Maybe shrooms.

Pairings that prove to be unsuccessful later are in fact rather prevalent, in addition to the mismatched stem diameters asked about there is delayed graft incompatibility, where the unions fail sometimes many years afterward - resulting in a lot of wasted time. In the case of black and English walnuts turning out not to be compatible in orchard plantings - right about the time useful production of nuts was commencing, 10-12 years after planting - a lot of time was not the only thing that was wasted.

I've had three different grafted Japanese apricots reach a nice size and then enter a decline, during which time the cherry plum root-stocks attempt to replace them with a thicket of sprouts of their own. I suspect this is delayed graft incompatibility, and might account for much of the fact that there is only a small number of these trees to be seen here even though it appears that for decades at least one local garden center or another has stocked them at any given time.

This post was edited by bboy on Wed, May 1, 13 at 14:32