I'll bet you can- but that's no guarantee. I mention from time to time my experiment grafting a prune plum to Nanking cherry (prunus tomentosa). It's entering its third year and appears to be healthy but quite dwarfed. We'll see what it does this year and next, if there is a next. Stone fruits often are compatible, but even so, there can be issues of delayed incompatibility, so you might not have your final answer for years. But I want to hazard a guess and a possible objection to your plan: it might work better to graft a more developed plant to a more primitive plant than the other way around, and it might work better to graft to a "forebear" than to a "cousin". In other words, I'm guessing that the wild host plant might work as a rootstock to more than one descendant but the reverse might not be true, and while two different fruits might graft to a common descendant they might not be cross compatible! i'm just thinking aloud on this- anybody actually know? I'd like to know. Good luck, and thanks! :-)M

Hi Konrad - thank's for the reply. I was thinking about having half of the tree be a mix of Pin Cherry and sweet cherry (Rainer, Lapins, Mont., Lapins) limbs. I wonder if the sweet cherry limbs will bare a lot of full-sized fruit. I have a native edible landscaping situation worked out in my yard - so I'd have the side with the sweet cherry limbs face my cultivated garden so that I don't see them when I'm in the middle of the yard (native persimmons, pawpaws, juneberries, the cane berries, plums, etc.) I want to make the Pin Cherry into a 15' wide colony, in a naturalistic effect. Maybe that's too little space and I'll just grow one and cut it down when it gets wider then 15' and replace it with one of it's clone suckers.

LOL MissSherry, I like browsing that tree forum and I think there were a few times I had to stop and admire your restraint when you ran into that sarcasm! I added a link for some cherry rootstock, but you would need to talk to someone much smarter than me in order to find something that works on anything other than commercial cherry varieties. Do you think trimming the trees down to the ground each year would work? There would be tons of fresh new growth each year to support cats and it would keep the tree to a manageable size as well. Plus the trimmed stems make great garden stakes! Try googling the word coppice or pollarding for more info.... it's alot easier than grafting, plus the tree puts on enough growth to feed an army (of army worms?).... which would not be the case if the tree were dwarfed by grafting, which slows down the growth. Here is a link that might be useful: cherry rootstock

Anybody have any luck with this yet?