Has anyone tried grafting other prunus species onto prunus ilicifolia (hollyleaf cherry/evergreen cherry) rootstock? I don’t have high hopes and am not sure if grafting a deciduous scion onto an evergreen rootstock would present issues, but it’s native and ubiquitous where I live so I’m interested to try (and probably will!)
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I have wondered the same. Might work, or might work with some sort of interstem. I think prunus ilicifolia is more distant than other plums but worth a shot. I also wonder about breeding with it. High seed to flesh ration though
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Has anyone grafted wild American plum be grafted onto a European prune plum?
Burbank had some crosse’s with it.
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From my experimenting with prunus serotina and prunus Virginiana an interstem from mirabelle plums will work. You might not need the interstem for American plums, and if you don’t have an mirabelle, then you could probably easily find tops of Myrobalan plum, people are constantly grafting onto it and throwing away the stems which can be used as interstems of course.
Krymsk86 is probably the most universal pyrus interstem, also nurseries will be throwing those stems away by the hundreds every grafting season.
I am curious if anyone has tried grafting other Prunus species directly into bush cherries, such as the romance series. They sucker so enthusiastically, they could produce many rootstocks per season.
Bush cherry was a not uncommon plum rootstock 20 years ago. I still have a couple plums on it. I eventually got the suckers under control. They can do this odd thing where the rootstock is much narrower than the graft growing on top so for example I now have this 8" diameter plum tree sitting on a 5" diameter root. (There is a name for this condition I think but it escapes me now.) The plum doesn’t seem to mind, it’s still growing like crazy 23 years after I planted it.
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I am so glad to learn that. Do you have pictures of that plum? That is very interesting. Better graft low on the rootstock then. Were your bush cherry P. tomentosa, japonica or hybrid like the romance series (P. fruticosa x P. cerasus?). I want to attempt to graft some varieties of plums on my Juliet’s suckers, but I won’t waste my scions if someone has already has a negative experience of using it as rootstock.
Thank you
I just remembered it is in fact a sand cherry, prunus besseyi. I consider them bush cherries since they are a bush but not sure if that is the standard use of terminology. They are related to the other bush types but not sure how much help on grafting compatibility it would be.
The base is under snow now and it’s 7F here so sorry no picture …
I would just do a few test grafts if nobody here has any more experience to report.
Oh it looks like there was a past thread here on this topic:
Looks like it has worked for some people.
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Hansen’s Bush Cherry is sand cherry, so I would call it one of several secies commonly known as bush cherry.
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I have a purple sand cherry, Prunus x cistena according to the Morton arboretum or a Cross between Prunus cerasifera (cherry plum) and Prunus pumila (sand cherry) according to Wikipedia. The aforementioned Juliet, Prunus fruticosa x Prunus cerasus and several rooted cuttings of what I think is Prunus Americana from wild plums of the area. I will try to graft a variety of Prunus scion on them and report back in several months. Thank you for the info !
Reverse bottlenecking.
Because it often looks like an upside-down beer bottle, or normal right side up bottlenecking, but that usually has suckers ruining the look.
As long at you prune the height down so it doesn’t get so heavy that it breaks at the union, it should be fine.
Also there’s a trick I learned from a Russian channel, if you graft sweet cherries onto tart cherries you’ll have reverse bottlenecking too, and common knowledge in Russia saiys they’ll always die eventually, but there’s a guy who showed if you cut a slice in the bark of the smaller trunk every year it prevents the bark from girdling the cambium and strangling the tree. So he slices with a slight spiral, like 10° off of vertical, with a box cutter all the way down to the wood every year in a parallel lines going around the tree about 2 inches farther every year (on a 10 inch rootstock) this way, the lower part can almost catch up in size and girdling is prevented.
You might want to try it!
I have an early on reverse bottlenecked graft, which probably will end up Normal but it’s funny because I grafted a 3/8" cultivar American persimmon onto a 1/8" seedling, and it survived and is growing.
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Aren’t pluerries all bush cherries and therefore still actually plums?
Nanking Cherries for example are bush plums.
In-arch grafting with a new rootstock next to it can save the top, also.
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I have Sweet Treat. Here is its parentage.
“Sweet Treat Pluerry™, an interspecific plum, includes plum, cherry, peach and apricot in its parentage.”
I believe they used Japanese plums for that part of the parentage.
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Interesting idea!
You do a bark graft down where the bottleneck is still small or where it’s full size? or what do you do?
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Graft higher than the choke point, some old textbooks even showed multiple host whips around the base grafted on.
‘Jesse in Maine’ showed a mature successful in-arch that saved a tree; girdled? maybe. Not sure if he’s on this forum.
Thanks to all who pulled the list together. Can you provide the hyperlink to the wiki?
It’s here. Any regular member can edit it.
So my Restoring Eden fruit cocktail tree is on Krymsk 1. It includes Lapins and Rainier.
I’ve not found a single article that mentions sweet cherry compatibility with sweet cherry for Krymsk1.
I did see it for Krymsk 5 & 6.
I guess time will tell.