I have limit knowledge on the subject, but I agree.
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It makes you wonder about the things that werent recordedā¦
The largest tree ever recorded in West Virginia was a white oak, measuring 13 feet in diameter at 16 feet from the base and 10 feet in diameter at 31 feet from the base. This ancient tree, located near Lead Mine in Tucker County and logged in 1913, was estimated to be over 1,000 years old and comparable in size to Californiaās famous Sequoias.
If you are into fruit history of the USā¦ this was interesting to me.
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I have bought most of my trees from Century Farm Orchard. Great nursery stock and great service from them.
This is an apple tree in a public area that Iāve been interested in grafting and finally got around to cutting some scions this spring.
I took this picture on May 7.
Today (June 6) I went to check on it and see how the apples were shaping up this year. The only thing left is this stump.
I have one graft of it and luckily it looks pretty healthy. Iām going to baby the hell out of that little tree. If thereā something you are interested in saving, donāt wait too long!
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Good advice. I had sort of the same thing happen to me. There was a business that had an apple tree, of some sort, in the middle of their parking lot. I went back a few months later to see what apple it actually was and they had cut it down and repaved over the parking lot. Bummer!
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Ive been looking for Chesapeake Blackberry for yearsā¦ it was released in 2000 and as far as i can tell its extinct.
I guess nobody wants a larger berry than Kiowa and more flavorful. 
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This reminds me of the Ga. Experimental Farm in Tifton. Some day all those old Pecan trees only in existence there will be mowed down for the very valuable real estate. Though at least those will probably used as barbecue wood.
Sadly they as a collection have little going for them; taste or good feature wise.
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Had the same thing happen to a ditch tree we found last fall. I was able to scrounge some twigs from the pile of chips/grindings. Iāve got a couple grafts showing life, so thereās a chance.
Seize the day
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Genetic drift can happen really quickly or really slowly, and graft compatibility isnāt a good proxy for genetic distance. For an extreme example, Wollemi nobilis is the only remaining species in the genus Wollemi and is from Australia, its closest relatives are in the Agathis genus, which are spread around Australasia. These genera separated from each other in the Cretaceous. Would you have believed that Australian Wollemi is graft compatible with New Zealand Agathis? It is. 100 million years of evolution and 2000 miles of ocean apart, still graft compatible. And it gets crazier. Most species in the Araucaria genus are graft compatibleādespite the fact that the South American and Australian Araucarias have been separated from each other since Gondwana broke up about 200,000,000 years ago. 200 million years of separation, still in the same genus, still graft compatible. Whatās even crazier is a lot of these Araucarias can even hybridize with each other.
And yet some citrus varieties that even share one parent and are literally half-siblings can be graft incompatible. And then you have Eucalyptus. As a genus, it diversified in very recent geological history, and yet between the 700 different species of Eucalyptus, only a handful of hybrids are known to exist. On the flip side, European and American oaks, despite evolving on different continents, hybridize quite freely. Then you have ĆChitalpa, a cross made between two entirely different genera. At least those two genera were both from North America. Genus Franklinia, from North America, can form hybrids with genus Schima, which from Asia. Cross generic and transcontinental hybrids. And yet for some things, even members of the same species are difficult or impossible to cross, such as American persimmons.
Graft compatibility and ease of hybridization are very, very poor indicators of genetic distance. And genetic distance is a very, very poor indicator of how long two populations have been separate.
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Wowā¦that is surprising information. Nature refuses to go down manās pigeon holes.
Corporations rely on peopleās default: laziness, and short sightedness. Theyād rather play a video game or buy some convenient pop tarts than grow a fruit tree. The choices that people think they have are framed by social media and the corporations. I donāt think we would have nearly as much obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer if our culture werenāt controlled by Big Pharma through major media. There is a push to buy expensive named patented fruit at the store even, instead of something that has no financial incentive, like Clarkās crabapple.
JohN S
PDX OR
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Count me in as interested in some cuttings or roots. I cannot grow boysenberries in MT and love them!
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Ok Iāll go to this thread when I have plants available. Not many at first.
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I would call it āK Street Marketā pressure. Even our government has slanted heavily to just working for corporations. You really should not have to involve a Congressmen when a government AG department refuses to work with someone out of the commercial clique or the Land Grant system they help finance.
I actually resent that a lot. Sorry Iām helping my state recover heritage cultivars they are seeking. But due to limited funding; lack the time and resources that a private person can embellish on it. Or help participate on a program throwing chill hours on itās ear with the state next store.
But that kind of corporate hierarchy is heavily invested in adding stuff to the food it sells. So a person who cans there own Pumpkin Sweet apples with no added sugars and perhaps some spices has a healthy product to shelve. Versus a corporation who is going to add corn syrup or sugar they likely have interests in. With color preservatives, stabilizers, pectin, gums of various types and gawd knows what else.
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@clarkinks Did you ever take a picture of the pumpkin?, someone might still have it growing somewhere. Donāt blame yourself, you were young. I also lost a prickly pear cactus and a cherry tomato that seeded itself and was very prolific, a green large peach because I did not know how to germinated them yet, but Iām actively searching for any sources. If you find a picture upload it. Now that I know grafting and learned about stratification I have saved a couple of jewels, not all is lost.Thanks
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We think a bit alike. In 1982 i was taking a class on evolution. The instructor made a statement to the effect that mammals, with their 4 chamber hearts, were the at the apex of evolution and humans were the top of the heap. Being a smartass 21 YO that i was I raised my hand and said āThat may be, until something comes along with a 5 chamber heart and a three lobed brain.ā The instructor just about blew a gasket screaming at me about how impossible that was. Poor guy, I just thought it was funny.
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Thank you for sharing. That is some crazy information for sure.
I would argue that the lack of correlation with the widely accepted timelines calls into question more the timelines than the similarity required for grafting. @FigGuy @dannytoro1 - agreed. Question everything. I may be wrong in this case and/or may not have enough information to come to a better conclusion. But i dont think the āexpertsā are always as expert as they or we think. They give the best explanation they can until someone comes up with a better one.
There is a collection of ancient trees at the end of my street going into the national forest. 5 for sure remain. There were many more. I have at least 3 of them safely (4 but it may be a duplicate) grafted onto a couple of my apple trees. 2 of the oldtimers have died in last couple years. I look forward to the grafts bearing fruit and someone on the forums helping identify the old fasioned fruit.
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That is an argument Iāve seen made, though not typically by people with much familiarity with geology, biology, etc. In general, proposing alternate timelines (Iāve seen suggestions as low as nine thousand years or thereabouts), tends to create more problems than it solves.
For example, and building off of what we were discussing earlier, the Araucaria genus has species in Australia, a few islands around Australia, and then South America, with no species in between. Thatās over 9000 miles of separation. Ok, but thatās just one genus, it doesnāt really tell you much and could be a coincidence that it doesnāt exist anywhere else. Except thereās a bizarrely large number taxa with this distribution.
Marsupialia
Nothofagus
Podocarpus
Araucaria
Callitroideae
Proteaceae
Griseliniaceae
Cunoniaceae
Atherospermataceae
Winteraceae
Myrteae
Bonnetiaceae
Australidelphia
Etc.
So Australia and South America, as well as parts of South Africa and Madagascar, and as weāre coming to find out as more fossils are unearthed in Antarctica, that all these places have taxa in common that exist nowhere else in the worldāmany of which donāt even have fossils anywhere else in the world. And yet, they are all spread out around the entire world and separated by massive oceans. These include animals, long, long lived trees with huge seeds that donāt spread by water, and all kinds of weird plants. The only explanation is that these places were physically in contact with each other, and nowhere else, for quite some time.
But if these are so far apart now, and continents drift so slowly, the timeline has to be really, really long. Granted, one could propose, as I have seen some amateurs do, that the continents simply moved faster in the past. Well, we know some did, and some moved slower. But if we assume all of them moved faster, we have a problem. Squeezing all that movement into a few thousands years, as is sometimes suggested, would mean the areas between, namely the Pacific, Indian, and Antarctic oceans, would be completely covered in very recent and active active volcanos, and all the bedrock would be freshly laid down lava. We know what it looks like when plates move a lotāthe Ring of Fire around the Pacific is clear enough for that. Now we have to take the movement of the plates around the Ring of Fire, and make it a million times faster? Yeah, the entire Southern Hemisphere would have to be one giant lava pit for that to work.
Thatās just one, rather simple, example of why trying to cook up different timelines is way more problematic than just accepting that genetics is pretty complicated stuff.
But anyway, weāre getting really off topic. I think Iāll leave it at that.
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I love a great discussion about these things. Iām genuinely impressed by the information youāve shared. Im always eager to learn new things. And yes, genetics is VERY complicated stuff.
Just to provide a brief CV, I started in the computer science/engineering world. Then I was working towards a B.S. in Botany, focus on genetics with a minor in Comp Sci. Then i moved over to Env Sci because i wanted to do more to save the world and species and so on, than i wanted to work for big Ag. Then I added coursework for a minor in Chem and shifted focus to water resources.
After 4 years working in tech, i went back to school to become a teacher, and have worked in education for 20+ years now.
Gardening and hybridizing specifically has been a passion of mine since i was 6 years old. Iāve only recently gotten into fruit trees, my Grandfather had great orchards but was a pragmatist, some were from my Great grandfather who was more like I am, trying to save diversity and old heirlooms. But my Grandfatherās passing a couple years ago and watching the ancient trees on my street die inspired me to start doing more to actually save some of this diversity we have left.
I absolutely love this forum because I think we all have a passiom for that. BTW, if you havent watched Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix it raises some great questions about possible human ocean travel much earlier. There was also a Discovery channel special about 20 years ago talking about cocaine and other south american only product used in mummies from Egypt to Ukraine. Only partly off topic because local extinction is often human driven. And exotic importation is also often human driven. And people have ben migrating round and round this planet since prehistoric times. Well that was stream of conciousness 
Iāll leave you all with this question, what is the biggest way WE as a group can impact the world for the better? - Is it in part through education? And saving as much diversity as we can in our own gardens and small orchards? Is it through spreading our favroite varieties to as many fellow forum members?
This threadās topic was about extinction. What can we do the best to stop it?
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