LOL, bud! Thanks & love your "pose." You kind of look like my little brother, interesting. That tree is a turkey fig in my Mom's yard. It makes so many figs, just what we can reach is usually way too many. I took that pic 2-3 years ago right after I pruned it extremely heavily. You can't tell, but I removed all of the growth from inside so we could "step into it" and pick from inside & out... or hide a bus full of kids. Great for climbing in there, too. It needs pruning again, which I will do later this summer after the figs are gone. Some of the branches are laying on the ground again. The original owner of the home gets the credit for the beautiful "bones" of the tree, though. All I have done is maintain what was already done so well, removing crossing branches, those going straight down, etc... I'm still not sure how he got it into such a nice "low vase" shape instead of the "naked trunk" appearance of most other trees I've seen in the area, but I've only been a southerner for 5 years, still a lot to learn about the plants & trees that are new to me here. I hope the baby trees from my cuttings will grow up to be even in the neighborhood of such fantastic-ness!

I checked on some of my grafts today, and found that a lot of them have failed either due to the nurse root rotting or the graft point failing. I've found that some Rockii Peonies do not take very well while most Chinese tree peonies happen to graft easily perhaps due to a thicker, more robust cambium layer. On the nurse roots that weren't rotted too much, I was able to save some of them, and re-attach them to a different scion stock to hopefully take with a spring grafting. I'm purposely using species that I know have been taking well. One issue may have been the extreme cold that froze through the tarp or too much dampness, but I'm looking forward to see what does emerge for me.

Several decades ago, I hybridized Poncirus trifoliata and Clementine mandarin using Poncirus as the pollen parent as Clementine is 100 % monoembryonic when used as the seed parent. The only difficulty was the timing of flowering of the 2 parents. Some of the flowers on the progeny were misshapen and not capable of setting fruit. A few of the hybrids were vigorous and fruited in a solar greenhouse without supplemental heat in southeastern Pennsylvania. These trees were planted directly in the soil with the perimeter of the greenhouse base insulated 4' deep using panels of Styrofoam insulation. One of the trees fruited with Clementine-like fruit, deep orange, seedless, not bitter, but tart, about 2 inches in diameter. Regrettably, I discontinued covering the greenhouse and lost the trees to winter cold. I had previously sent 2 scions to an amateur citrus breeder in Tifton, GA. He was an elderly gentleman at that time and they may not have been further propagated. These trees began flowering and fruiting at 5-6 years of age. I did not fertilize these plants and did no pruning as flowering began on the most distal branches, especially on the longer upper branches beginning to bend downwards.

The way the stock on your specimen looks pinched at it enters the ground indicates deformity due to careless container culture. There's a few things I have to say on this one. First, Nope to the lifted comment. Not a chance from a tree that can put on an inch of caliper a year. If it were the case, every single Metasequoia I've ever seen has the same issue...they grow so quickly, in such a non-radial manner, you're going to have idiosyncrasies in how the trunk appears. I've seen a few trees over the years where the scion grew much faster than the stock, or vice versa. a few. I saw one once that had an interstock that grew faster than either scion or stock. By a few, I don't suppose I've seen more than one every few years. They exist. What is the eventual outcome, due to the unequal growth rate? Eventual failure, I'm sure, but in how many years, I just don't know. Every so often, a variant of this question appears on various threads here. Usually in the guise of picture heavy threads of specimens that grow lopsided on one side of the graft or another. Years ago, in my college years (yes, I can remember them), there was a discussion re: graft incompatibility with one of the professors. Long story short, it's complicated, and hard to predict. The specific question was re: caragana and the weeping varieties, what I recall was that he didn't think there was any truly compatible combination of stock, interstock, and scion. But most would last about 20 years before petering out. I've seen orchard rows where in a row or block, there's be one or a few individuals exhibiting vigorous stock growth relative to the scion, or vice versa. Blocks planted at a rate of 1400 hundred trees an acre, and there may be one or a couple, all otherwise identical, except for a meagre handful of rogue individuals. No way to predict, and really nothing to do except let it live it's course.