Just making an update based on my previous comment about planning to graft medlar to wild crabapples.
I grafted some Puciu Mol medlar scions onto a couple wild crabapples last spring, as well as some wild hawthorns.
The type of hawthorns I have here are all fairly small trees with skinny trunks. They ended up getting hit really hard by the 17 year cicadas that emerged here last year, so those all failed due to the hawthorn trunks being torn apart.
The grafts on crapapple did really well, though. One of the crabapples that I grafted to was a decent size, healthy tree with a few trunks. I grafted high, around 6 ft, to keep the scions out of deer browse range (probably not that necessary in hindsight). Those grafts started to push buds faster than any of the other grafts I did last year, including apple on apple, apple on crabapple, pear, mulberry, plum.
I’ll include a couple pics from last fall to show how well they grew. The graft unions feel pretty sturdy and look pretty good after winter. They grew pretty vigorously vertical, as medlars seem to do. I will prune them down soon to try and get them to push out some lower branches. Oddly enough, the one scion in the pictures that is dead was actually a Wickson crabapple that I tried grafting to that tree as well.
