"Steve Wolfe" wrote in message
...

Early this year, I was at one of the warehouse-type discount stores, and
saw some snow fountain cherry trees in 20-gallon containers for a very
good
price. I figured "Why not?", because I wanted to put some trees in a park
strip anyway.

Well, they did quite well for the first 3 or 4 months. But last month,
one declined and died. Now, the other two are following the same pattern.
Here's what's going on:

The actual tree trunks (to which they've attached the cherry grafts)
are
alive and thriving, while the actual cherry grafts are slowly drying up,
going brown, and dying. The actual trunks are putting out stems and
leaves
quite happily - but they aren't, of course, cherry stems! I've made sure
that the watering is appropriate, but because the trunks are doing so
well,
I'm a bit baffled.

Does this sort of thing mean that I got bad trees from the start, or
are
there environmental/care-related factors that would cause the graft to die
while not the trunk?

steve

The graft has simply failed, which is a common enough occurrence on grafted
trees IF insufficient time has been allowed for the graft to take or less
than proper care was exercised during the grafting process. This is much
more likely to happen on trees which are cheaply mass produced for
discounters or box stores than by quality growers. 20 gallon trees are
pretty large, so perhaps the graft was attempted when both the root stock
and scion were too mature. BTW, that IS a cherry growing from below the
graft union, just not a very desirable one.

pam - gardengal