Has anyone attempted to produce graft chimeras or graft hybrids? If so, I would love to learn from your success or failures. I have tried a few things, so far most have been unsuccessful but one appeared to work.
I have tried to graft near a bud as sometimes that bud can form a chimera, but am yet to have that bud actually grow. I have heard that grafting and then cutting down the scion so it shoots can form chimeras, but I haven’t had success with this as the scion tends to shoot too far from the union.
I have grafted, then excised the graft union and grew it on nutrient agar. I got the callus to form a few plantlets. Most of the plantlets died but one survived. The resultant plant appeared to be a true graft hybrid. While I had no way of testing this, it did not seem to be a chimera, it appeared to be uniform and looked distinctly different from either of the parent species. Unfortunately it died as I tried to plant it out too early and had not hardened it off sufficiently.
Apparently there has been some work done on producing graft hybrids over the years. This is a very interesting topic and I am surprised it has not been more widely explored.
The article references Michurin, and I just ordered that book for $10 from the U.K. There was a mystery in the fig community a while ago with Florea aka Michurinska 10 and the most logical explanation to me ended up being that Florea could be a chimera (a couple Florea plants produced suckers that seemed to be a different variety). I remember @aphahn has one of these “duck foot Floreas” also.
For species with male and female plants, graft hybridization could be really useful assuming they can be produced by non-sexual means.
I found a book that appears to have collected a bunch of different examples. You would have to take what it says with a grain of salt as it appears to include things that are just hearsay and likely never happened.
I can’t afford the book, so am just replying on the online preview.
Evidently that particular picture is more fantasy than fantastic; the plant, however, is still pretty interesting.
There is also a hawthorn-medlar chimera as well. I’ve found no mention of the taste of the fruit, though one source says it is red. I’ll still pass, I’ve already got a medlar I really don’t eat the fruit from.
