Bud Plant Art

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What do the terms grafting and budding say?

Budding is a form of graft. Grafting is the art of attaching a piece of one plant to another plant, creating a new plant. Grafting is usually done because the desired plant is extremely difficult or impossible to propagate through other means. Dogwoods, for example, are easy to grow, however, it is almost impossible to grow a Pink Dogwood from seed. The seeds of a pink dogwood will produce plants that are likely to flower white.

The most common method for producing Pink Dogwood is to remove a single bud of a pink dogwood tree and slip it under the bark of a White Dogwood seedling. This process is known as grass, and the plant is known as the rootstock. This is usually done during the summer months when the end of the white bark of the dogwood seedlings can be easily separated from the tree and the seedling is about 1 / 4 "diameter.

A very small "T" shaped cut is made in the bark only, and the bud is slipped into the slot. The bud itself is allowed to rummage through the opening, then the wound is covered with an elastic band above and below the bud. The following spring, the bud is grafted to the seedling, when the plant is cut just above the pink dogwood and the bud then grows into a tree, pink dogwood.

Budding is usually done at ground level and often the rootstock will send up shoots down EU buds. These shoots, often called suckers, should be removed as soon as they appear, because they are the rootstock and are not the same variety as the rest of the plant. Flowering Crabapples are also grafted and are known to produce suckers. When the removal of these discharges are not only the clip to the ground level with pruning shears, they will simply grow back. Pull on the ground or mulch and remove them completely from the tree where they emerge from the stem.

Most people clip them a few inches off the ground, and then they grow back with multiple stems. This makes me mad! Get as low as possible and remove them completely and you keep them under control. On older trees that have been improperly pruned for years I take a cat to dig and literally attack these releases them hacking away from the stem. Sure it does some damage to the stem of the tree, but when a plant is let go like that, I figure this is a situation or die. The trees always survive and thrive.

Other plants are grafted up high to create an effect of crying. One of the most popular trees that is grafted in height is the top graft Weeping Cherry. In this case, the seedling is allowed to pass at a height of 5 ', the weeping variety is grafted onto the rootstock at a height of about 5'. This creates an umbrella type effect. In this case the graft union is 5 'on the ground, so anything that pushes the stem below that graft must be removed.

Many people do not understand this and before they know they have a branch 2 "in diameter growing through the canopy of their tree crying. Before you know there are several branches growing vertically through the canopy and the effect of the plant is completely ruined.

On my site, I http://gardening-articles.com few photos that show exactly what I talk about in this article. You can clearly see the effect that tears Weeping Cherry is supposed to have, but then the middle.