North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[rmelrose@bluemoo.net]

Thanks Charles, it is very important to hear from someone with direct
experience! If you can spare the effort, I would be interested to know a
little more detail of what you tried and discovered, even if it is
negative.

Round here we have, growing `wild', lots of Prunus serotina, Prunus nigra
(mostly planted I think, ours are rather poor but I am trying to clean them
up a bit) and what I suppose is Prunus virginiana rather than pennsylvanica
although I am not completely sure on the latter. The Prunus nigra spreads
by rootsprouts, hence its poor appearance, but I had not noticed this in
the others. Does anyone know of any effort in the past to cross these wild
cherries with other domestic Prunus?

Richard



On  2 Aug, Charles Paradise wrote:
> Richard,
> I would spare you trying sweet cherry on wild black cherry.
> wild black cherry could be Prunus Serotina, the cherry furniture in 
> Pennsylvania is made from,
> perhaps we should call it the Wild Furniture Cherry and be more certain 
> which cherry we are
> referring to?  Or perhaps you might be referring to Prunus Virginiana, a 
> more bushy form.   In
> either case, I believe you will encounter severe incompatibilities even 
> though all these
> cherries appear to share the same 16 chromosomal count.   Consider, for 
> example that your
> european cherries bear their fruit in clusters directly off the stem, but 
> the Prunuses Serotina
> and Virginiana bear their cherries on racemes.   This makes the Sweet and 
> Sour european cherries
> and the Prunuses Serotina and Virginiana about as different from each other 
> as say, crab and
> lobster are from each other. Of course if it sounds like I detected these 
> cherry-differences
> early on and reasoned out their graft incompatibilities, think again, 
> because in my try-anything
> approach I grafted lots of sweet and sour cherries onto Prunus Serotina, 
> got takes that over the
> course of 12 months barely survived and finally languished.  In my case the 
> thought usually
> follows the experience, rather than the other way around.
> 
> What you might have compatibility with is grafting sour or sweet european 
> cherries onto the
> american species Prunus Pennsylvanica, which bears cherries in clusters off 
> the stem same as the
> european cherries do.  The growing and underground spreading habit of the 
> Prunus Pennsylvanica
> might not be too promising for this work, though, and I have not tried 
> grafting anything onto
> Prunus Pennsylvanica.  I think I got tired before I got to trying that 
> combination.
> 
> Found a seedling Mulberry down the street and some are ripe this 
> morning...absolutely delicious,
> best ungrafted Mulberry I've tasted.
> Charlie Paradise
> zone 5 / Massachusetts / looking forward to NAFEX let's have dinner on 
> August 21 who will join
> me?