John McGaw wrote:

sherwindu wrote:
Laura,

Found the time to check further. Both sweet cherries and wild black cherry are
both prunus, so grafting should be possible.

Sherwin D.

snip...


Whoa! Don't go too far too fast. Prunus is a large genus and off the top
of my head I recall that cherries and plums and apricots and peaches and
nectarines and sloes and almonds (of all things) are all members. I'm
pretty sure that the requirements for successful grafting are much
stricter than mere membership in the same genus otherwise you'd surely
seem some serious franken-fruit trees for sale at every nursery.

Now, mixing genes to produce new kinds of fruit is a different matter.
We are talking about grafting two species together. The way they sell
trees at most nurseries, you wouldn't know if your cherry was sitting on
top of a plum or peach rootstock.

My original thought was not to totally rule out the possibility of a graft
union between most members of Prunus. I would say that fruits in the Prunus species
would be a requirement for compatible grafting, not a done deal. You can
graft cherries onto certain plum rootstocks, etc. There is a lot of latitude for
mixing
species here.

I found a reference to some people in Nafex who grafted sweet cherries on
capulin (Prunus salicifolia) with limited short term success, but they eventually
all died out. Capulin very similar to black cherry, is used as a rootstock for
European sweet cherries in Guatemala. The whole idea of grafting sweet cherries
onto a wild black cherry seems risky, at best. I have to defer to our Toronto
friend on this one. There are plenty of genetic differences at the species level to
make this kind of graft difficult, if not impossible.

Sherwin D.


--
John McGaw
[Knoxville, TN, USA]
http://johnmcgaw.com