View Single Post
Old 21-Feb-2008   #5
waltseed
bonsaiTALK Expert
 
Join Date: Sep-2003
Location: Ellsworth
Country: USA
Posts: 187
This is an interesting question. One I hadn't thought about before.
I suspect that any pair of species that are graft compatible could be made to fuse.
Just as there are different degrees of graft compatiblity, there must be different degrees of fusing compatiblity. Fusing is actually a form of grafting, after all.
We don't often think of apples and pears as being graft compatible, but I know people who have gotten rare apple scions when they had no apple stock, not even temporary ones such as an old tree they could put the scion on as a twig. So they put the apple scion on a pear, where it remained alive untill the next season, at which time they had aquired an apple rootstock.
So could apple and pear fuse? Maybe it isn't worth finding out. But maybe it opens the possiblity of rather unlike, but related, species fusing.
Is there a desire for striped trunks? I don't know.

Someone will wonder what I meant by "rare apple scions".
NAFEX, the North American Fruit Explorers, is dedicated to finding and preserving old varieties of fruit, and new ones too.
Some varieties have become extinct due to not being good commercial varieties, but were excellent for home use. Sometimes one comes across a tree suspected of being a variety previously thought extinct. And maybe it is sick or "in the way", and won't be around next year. Then some people will try anything to keep some scionwood alive. Sometimes it works.
Such emergency grafts sometimes work for a few years, then fall apart, having never really connected securely across the graft.
Such grafts looked at after falling apart often look as if they had been cut through by a razor.
It seems that sometimes a graft will be good enough to feed sap across a graft, without a solid connection.

While I am quite interested in this idea, I don't see how it would be useful in bonsai. Yenling, would you share your ideas of how one might use it?
__________________
Waltseed
waltseed is offline   Reply With Quote