The advantages of grafting

By John Warrington

Looking back through one of my journals I read a note I made a few years ago about my Pandanus baptistii screw pine which had finally died. Some pieces were planted, and the yield of fruit from it was astonishing. Twenty fruits in all and three of them weighing over 15lbs each. Several of the pieces I planted survived.

There was a note in the Observer newspaper of November 16, 1924 of an experiment carried out in Scotland concerning the grafting of a tomato onto a potato. The object was to produce a stronger tomato. The resulting plant produced a crop of tomatoes above ground and a crop of potatoes below the surface. There didn’t seem to be a marked difference in tomato size. Otherwise there was little difference. Anyone with a little knowledge can carry out this ‘operation’ with a fair chance of success. In this experiment the object was to try and produce a stronger tomato plant due to the strength of the potato roots, but time has shown that it is still better to grow tomatoes from seed and to grow potatoes from tubers planted in the ground. There are many examples of closely related plants being successfully joined together in the plant kingdom by grafting.

Quite a few years ago I visited the rose nursery belonging to a flamboyant character in England called Harry Wheatcroft. A man of great character with an enormous face of whiskers. Harry sold the roses whilst his sons and staff budded hundreds of thousands of them, each son doing several hundred a day. Back-breaking work in the fields which enabled the nursery to offer high-quality roses on uniform and vigorous rootstocks developed from wild roses. Roses are budded quite low down on the stem which has been softened beforehand for a few weeks by drawing earth up around them.

At budding time the earth is drawn away and buds are inserted into a T shaped incision. These buds slip into the ‘T’ cut without trouble, as the outer skin of the rose stem lifts easily. For those planting budded roses care should be taken not to plant the budded part below the ground, but just at or slightly above the surface soil level. Many hibiscus can also be grafted, not only for the vigour that can be obtained from a more common rootstock, but because some rootstocks give immunity from stem and root eelworms.

Some of you may have experienced that it is relatively easy to root rose cuttings from even good modern hybrids, but they rarely get to the same size as their grafted counterparts or live as long. It’s all in the genes of the more common forms. In the case of hibiscus the graft (usually a saddle graft) is placed about 9 to 12 inches above the ground, tied in with tape and covered in grafting wax to keep disease out. New shoots arise from budded roses and grafted hibiscus very quickly……