Because they are cheap. I guess a better question might be where to get cherry rootstock?

I have some mature cherry trees that had some branches broken this winter. I've salvaged a small pile of scions from these trees and I'd like to do something with them before spring.

I've found year old serotina trees for about $.80 each. I'd like to bench graft about 30 trees and was just wondering if it would be worth the effort. Are they compatible? Would they have a good chance to survive? Yea, I realize they will get huge...I'm okay with that.

Probably compatible- I've grafted italian prune plum to nanking cherry successfully (so far- no telling about delayed rejection after just a few years.) In that single case the result appears to be very dwarfed. Nice little tree so far, though.

A number of years ago I read (in a very old book) that serotina will not work.

Robert

My understanding is that P.serotina is not compatible with most fruiting cherry selections. Can't direct you to any published document, but that's what I've always been told.

Nanking cherry is actually more closely related to plums than to true cherries. I've used it as a dwarfing rootstock for peaches and Japanese hybrid plums - and, as marknmt indicates, it is quite dwarfing.

We grow Prunus Serotina and have grown Prunus Virginiana and attempted unsuccessfully to graft both. I tried sweet and sour cherry grafts. Unfortunately I'm unaware of any documentation on the subject. Serotina grafts did not attempt to leaf out but the buds did turn green and swell and then died. Virginiana grafts leafed out and died a short time later. They are incompatible rootstock for anything I have tried so far (not that I'm done trying). Prunus besseyi would be a better wild choice for grafting though if you do stick with grafting plums to it and do not graft cherries to the western sand cherry. Prunus tomentoso I have not tried. If you plan to do a lot of grafting and need inexpensive rootstock try a nursery that sells it specifically and in my opinion stick with Prunus avium aka mazzard cherry. Here is a link to a nursery that sells rootstock at a reasonable price in larger quantity for what you are looking for (cheaper than .80) http://www.lawyernursery.com/productinfo.aspx?productSpecies=Prunus avium.&categoryid=39 Then I would use a whip and tongue graft or something similar to attach the graft to the rootstock like in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7blxoFfJC4I . Been down that road and wanted to save you some trouble based of my experience.

Prunus avium is not your only option but here is a link to all the options Lawyer Nursery (which I would deal with for this purpose) have available http://www.lawyernursery.com/category.aspx?categoryid=100&openid=100
By the way the best time to graft is when the root stock tree is still dormant prior to it leafing out but that's not the only time you can do it. The scions cannot be taken off their mother tree and grafted on the main rootstock tree once they start to leaf out but if the main rootstock is leafed out you can technically still graft dormant scions on the root stock tree. I would let the root stocks get established for a year and then graft to them the second year but some people graft them at the same time they put them in the ground. If a person is in a hurry they refrigerate the scion wood in the spring and let the rootstocks grow for a while and then graft to them (scion wood can keep a couple of months in the refrigerator). Kansas environment is a little to harsh for grafting the same year. We also typically make our grafts shorter (about 2- 3 inches or 3-4 buds sticking up) for a couple of reasons such as wind is extreme here and a taller graft can be bent over time before it takes and It's easier for the plant to take care of 3 inches of graft than 6 inches etc..

Attached is an interesting article on these varieties

Here is a link that might be useful: Information on compatbale plants and uses

I've heard *some* have had success w/P. virginiana, but not serotina.

The North American cherries are not as closely related to P. avium and cerasus as you'd think. I do think P. padus (European bird cherry) might be a bit more like virginiana and serotina, however.

The Asian "flowering" cherries like P. serrulata and P. subhirtella are closer genetically to the European cherries.

hairmetal4ever,
Do you know what they grafted to P.virginiana?

If we could ever find a compatible variety we could possibly graft them using an interstem. I can dream about that day.

A little off-topic, but just wanted to mention here that P. serotina is very closely related to Capulin cherries, so the two would most likely be very graft compatible.
From the research I have done, cherries can generally be divided into four different families: Sweet cherries, Asian flowering cherries, Sour cherries, and cherries native to the American continent. (the first two of these families generally have 16 chromosomes, while the last two have 32 chromosomes)

There are tasty versions of Capulin cherry (South American, perhaps Mexican) that are spoken of but I have never found any available for purchase. The tree was an edible one before the Spanish conquest, and was one of the lost crops of the Incas . . . IF you would graft them they would take (perhaps)

It's possible to graft any cherry onto any other cherry. They're not all the time considered "compatible" though, but in practice that means dwarfing and stunted growth, i.e. the tree won't be as healthy and productive as it could otherwise be.

Generally the different cherry varieties can be divided into a couple of groups (some of these groups are closer in compatibility to each other than other groups). That being said, I'm not sure about choke cherry, but from what I know I am probably going to guess yes.

Sweet cherry crosses spontaneously rather often with otherwise seemingly dissimilar bitter cherry here on the west coast to produce the functionally sterile hybrid Puget cherry - I know of many places here in western WA where this hybrid can be seen in the wild.

"Phylogenetic studies employing DNA sequences from chloroplast and nuclear genes (E. Bortiri et al. 2001, 2002; S. Lee and J. Wen 2001) have shown that the five subgenera accepted by Rehder and his placement of individual species within them are not supported. So far, an alternative infrageneric classification of Prunus that accounts for the majority of its species has yet to be proposed. Character reconstruction, or the mapping of morphological characters onto phylogenetic trees based in large part on molecular data, shows that there is considerable homoplasy in most of the characters previously used to delimit subgenera, sections, and species (J. Shaw and R. L. Small 2004; Bortiri et al. 2006). Few new morphological characters useful in writing a key to the clades resolved by molecular phylogenetics have emerged. Prunus is presented here without division into subgenera or sections."

http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=1&taxon_id=126865

It doesn't work on choke cherry...best I found was P. maackii but not advisable, not always compatible for the long run and the cherries are smaller.

I have observed many roadside hybrids of the crosses on the west coast embrothrium talks about. Now and then you can find seeds being produced, and even probably less so, some do germinate. From those rare kinds it seems possible to select out of f1 sterility that exists between bitter and sweet cherries to something more stable. If anybody wishes to find one, try looking for it on both sides of old north pointing road I think is hwy-99 not far west of I-5 on what is almost the tip of NW Washington. It is on the north edge of the most NW waterway bridge that exists in United States or WA -if that makes it any easier. For what ever reason I don't understand that one blooms before either sweet or bitter cherry, but it is certainly the proper cross.

From the Topic Heading:

"Hi, can you use wild black cherry (P. Serotina) or choke cherry (P. Virginiana) as rootstock for commercial cherry varieties?"

Ten years ago I tried grafting cherry and plum to P. Virginiana demisa. The truth is that plum works better than cherry.

One of my successful plums has been fruiting for several years and still pushing lots of growth. All grafting was performed in my wooded P. Virginiana lot consisting of what is thought of as sibling seedlings rather than an underground generated population consisting of clones. One of (so called plum grafted on a selaction) was inserted as a side graft @ 4 foot above the ground of the tree. In and of itself is likely P. V. demisa due to it being a lot on the NE backdrop of Mt. Ranier where in mapping that the range of wild (sub-culture) could theoretcally exist.

If I were to select some of any lower branches below the 4 foot and graft them to other species types (ie virginiana, padus, possibly serotina) then it should work; unless like in Konrad's case, the fruits end up smaller than normal. For me in as far as I could tell from the small fruited wild plum I was using the limatation I would doubt be ever recognized.

My guess is that you conditionally can graft P. Virginiana to plums and amur cherry to cherry. Maybe even amur cherry can work with plums for little reasons that I mistakenly grafted wild apricot on amur as apparent by the shape of the leaf and they grew with great intensity that way the whole growing season, before manually taking them out.

Another guess is that I think the problem Konrad brought up about smaller fruits is true because I read a report on the small fruiting Pyrus Betulafolia, and that it influences smaller pear fruiting to pears, although not always.

When I started out these experiments my ending goal (since Padus is ferel in Fairbanks Alaska) was to find fruits that would graft to Prunus Padus. Of itself Padus being the close European synonym of our P. Virginiana ecotypes, also being graft compatible. For now padus and virginiana prove that it "is" possible "only" with plums.

note: Through experiments by others -Virginiana and Padus to each other are recipricol graft compatibles.

They sell capulin cherries at home depot every so ofteen for those interested in capulin cherry