Grafting is the process by which a twig or a bud

Field, Forest and Farm by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. GRAFTING

CHAPTER XXXVII. GRAFTING

“Grafting is the process by which a twig or a bud1 is transplanted from one branch to another, or from one tree to another. That which is to serve as support and sustenance to the transferred part is known as the stock, while the twig or bud received by it is called the graft.

“One absolutely necessary condition must be fulfilled if this operation is to be successful: the transferred part must find on its new nursing-branch nutriment to its taste, that is to say, a sap like its own. This requires that the two plants, the stock and the one that furnishes the graft, should be of the same species or at least belong to closely related species, since likeness of sap and its products can result only from likeness of organization. It would be a mere waste of time to try to engraft the lilac upon the rose, or the rose upon the willow, for there is nothing in common between these three species either in leaves, flowers, or fruit. This difference in structure is invariably accompanied by a marked difference in respect to nutrition. Hence the rose-bud would starve to death on a lilac-branch, and [185]the lilac-bud would meet with the same sad fate on a rose-bush. But lilac can very well be grafted on lilac, rose-bush on rose-bush, vine on vine. And one can even go further than this: a peach-bud will flourish on an apricot-tree, a cherry-bud on a plum-tree, and vice versa; for between the members of each of these pairs there is a close and easily discernible analogy. In short, there must be the closest possible resemblance between the two plants if grafting is to succeed.

A—Saddle GraftingB—Cleft GraftingC–D—Whip Grafting

“The ancients were far from having any clear idea on this absolute need of likeness in organization. They tell us of grafting the holly with the rose to obtain green roses, the walnut tree with the grape to produce enormous grapes as large as walnuts. In our own time has not the project been seriously considered of grafting a vine shoot on to a mulberry tree in order to restore vigor to the grape whose roots an underground grub has attacked? Such graftings and others between plants completely unlike have never been successfully undertaken except in the imagination of those who dreamt them.

“We have already seen that, grown from seed, our various fruit trees do not, as a rule, reproduce the quality of fruit of the parent stock; an invincible [186]tendency to revert to the wild state causes the fruit to lose, little by little, from one generation to another, the improvement it had acquired through cultivation. Thus the pear, through repeated plantings of the seed, would become increasingly sour, small, and hard, until it had at last returned to the sorry state of the wild pear growing on the edge of the woods. But this defect attending growth from the seed is redeemed by one very desirable quality: the tree thus grown regains more or less the robustness of its wild type; it is incomparably more vigorous, healthier, longer-lived, than the artificially perfected tree whose strength is compromised by the very excess of its fructification. One has vigor, the other fine fruit. The two attributes cannot go together; if one increases, the other decreases. Well then, these robust specimens reared from the seed are just what we require for grafting. Used as stocks, they supply the quality inherent in them, namely, vigor; and the cutting engrafted upon them furnishes the other quality, excellence of fruit.

“Accordingly it is the practice to plant the pips of pears and apples, and the stones of apricots and peaches; and on the trees thus obtained to graft cuttings from pear, apple, apricot, and peach trees that bear fruit of recognized superiority. In this way there are united in the same tree the root and trunk of the robust and almost wild kind with the leaves and blossoms of the weak but artificially improved kind. Every variety of pear tree is by nature fitted to receive a pear graft, every variety of peach tree [187]to receive a peach graft, and so on with all fruit-trees. There is no objection to selecting as stock any wild pear, cherry, or plum tree that may have sprung up of itself in hedge or thicket. It is thus for example that the cherry is grafted on two others of like sort, the wild cherry and the cherry of Saint Lucia, both frequenters of uncultivated hillsides. The first bears fruit hardly as large as a pea, black, round, and full of a very dark and rather bitter juice; the second has still smaller fruit with scarcely any pulp and uneatable. No matter: with grafts from a suitably chosen source they will cover themselves with the finest cherries. In like manner our superb garden roses can be grown on the wild rose stock, the common dog rose of the hedges, whose modest blossoms have only five petals of a pale carnation color and are well-nigh odorless. Sometimes, again, two species of similar characteristics are chosen for grafting purposes. Thus the pear grafts well on the quince-tree, the fruit of the latter being, after all, a sort of big pear; the apricot can be grafted on the plum; the peach on the plum and, still better, on the almond, so like the peach in its foliage, its early blossoming, and the structure of its fruit.

“As a curiosity let us mention the mixing of several kinds of fruit on the same stock. By means of grafting the same tree can bear, all at one time, almonds, apricots, peaches, plums, and cherries, because these five kinds admit of reciprocal grafting; another tree may be covered simultaneously with [188]pears, quinces, berries of the mountain ash, medlars, and service-berries. These are very odd instances, certainly, but of no practical interest. It would be a waste of time to dwell longer on them did they not teach a useful lesson. They demonstrate that however many fresh grafts are added to a tree, the new-comers exert no influence outside their own sphere. Whether offshoots of the tree itself or aliens, the grafts develop, blossom, and fructify, each after its own kind, without contracting any of its neighbor’s habits. Among the curious phenomena observed in this artificial juxtaposition of mutually independent grafts, we will mention a pear-tree on which were represented, by means of grafting, all the different varieties of cultivated pears. Sour or sweet, dry or juicy, large or small, green or bright-colored, round or long, hard or mellow, each and all ripened on the same tree and grew again year after year without change, faithful to the specific character, not of the supporting tree, but of the various grafts planted on this common stock.

“The mere bringing together of analogous plants does not suffice for the success of the operation of grafting; there must be a considerable extent of contact between those parts of the graft and the stock that have the most vitality and are consequently best fitted to coalesce. This contact should be in the inner layers of the bark and in the seat of plant-growth situated between the wood and the bark. The vital activity of the plant, in fact, resides especially in this region. It is between the wood [189]and the bark that the elaborated sap descends; there is where new cells and new fibers are organized, to form on one side a sheet of bark and on the other a layer of wood. Hence it is there and only there that coalescence is possible between the graft and the stock.”

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