The Adventure of my Front-Yard Tree

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Disclaimer: None of these pictures are mine. If you are interested in seeing my tree let me know and I’ll learn how to post pics here. Now to the story.

When we bought our house, the centerpiece of the front yard was what I thought was (spoiler alert it wasn’t) a beautiful ornamental cherry tree. The next winter it died (awwwwww) and it didn’t take long for our town code-enforcement officer (there’s a story of why she can’t be police) who has turned the town into her personal HOA to roll by and order me to cut the tree down due to its deathness. I chop it down to the stump with my ax intending to dig out the stump when I replace the tree. The next spring, a different tree starts growing there. WTF? Over the past couple of years the tree has spread through runners and it is a nice enough tree and the copse is only 3 ft in diameter - perfect for blocking our living room window from the street so hey, free new tree.

Here in NoCO we have had the prefect cycle of rain and sun for a week and the new tree for the first time starts budding. Yesterday Mrs Cad and I get home, I take a look at the tree (and the bees, this tree is really the bees knees. Ha ha ha) and I immediately identify the tree through its blossoms as an Apple Tree. A Paradise Apple tree to be more precise (I had to look it up). But wait! There’s more! At the bottom there are switches from the original tree. WTF again? My plant identifying app says it is a Prairie Crabapple and looking at the fruit online yes that is the original tree. So what happened?

It’s no big secret that most fruit trees are a good fruit species (or in this case a really pretty species) grafted onto hardier root stock. The most common root stock for apple trees? Take a guess and scroll to the last paragraph. The prairie crabapple? A common ornamental tree in the Midwest and something the previous owner would have planted. That and rocks but that’s a different story. I guess a tiny piece of the graft survived and given the right conditions, the same one that had the paradise apple bloom for the first time, it sprung forth like Lazarus.

So that’s the story of the resurrected apple tree. It’ll be interesting to see how both species look together especially after a couple more years. Has anyone ever heard of a modern root-stock developing into a full fledge tree like this? And how crazy that the graft was dormant like that. I wonder if I have left the tree how much was still alive. The paradise apple is edible but I think it is still a crabapple (which is just a sour apple right?) so maybe some apple jelly or a pie with a ton of sugar is in my future.

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I haven’t had this happen with a tree, but I did with a rose bush. When I bought it, it was labeled as a mini bush with delicate, fragrant light pink blossoms. After a couple years of keeping it as a house plant, I decided to plant it outside. It quickly grew quite large, and the blooms from it turned into full-sized magenta flowers, which had no fragrance at all. Which was a bit of a bummer.

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Grafted fruit trees often try to push out shoots from the hardy root stock, which in normal circumstances you would clip off as soon as you found them, to keep them from stealing food from the more-desired grafted-on tree. If you have shoots from both growing from about the same time, I predict the root stock will do its darnedest to take over, so if you want equal tree parts you may have to prune that one back from time to time. Ideally, you would then get fruit from both species on the same tree. (I have seen accounts online of people who have grafted numerous different fruit trees onto one root stock, but I don’t think the root stock ever gets any love except just as the root.)

So enjoy your sour apples. You could make cider, like in your link.

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Rootstocks will generally grow into a full tree if given the chance. It’s common to have to prune off rootstock suckers even if the original grafted tree is alive; and the death of the top can trigger rootstock growth.

But it’s not clear to me if you’re saying somebody grafted a cherry tree onto apple rootstock? If so, that may have been why it died. I don’t know enough about rootstock compatiblities to know off the top of my head whether such a graft would even take in the first place.

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I didn’t. I thought it was an ornamental cherry but it was a prairie crabapple.