I wrote an article a while ago in the Pome News about growing an apple bush out of flowering quince stock and aronia stock. The flowering quince rootstock looks like it always wants to overtake the crabapples. At this point, I would no longer recommend grafting onto flowering quince for that reason. I have many crabapples growing now that I will harvest in the fall from them, but aronia also takes the graft and seems to have no problems. It also doesn't have thorns, which is easier, and grows more easily from cuttings. It also suckers less if at all, so from now on, I'll just use aronia to graft on crabapples. By the way, it also works for mountain ash. I'm going to try to order some of the varieties that Plumfan recommended.
John S
PDX OR
Do bud grafts also take and live? Could I perhaps get something nice out of the monster mountain ash that takes up an entire back yard and serves only to feed hundreds of starlings? It casts far too much shade, though, so I don't imagine I could ever get anything but invasive-pest-feeding orange berries from the tree.
I have never looked it up Marsha, but since I could graft Mountain ash onto aronia, I should be able to graft other pome fruit onto Mountain ash, if that's what you want to do.
I like mountain ash, but kind of like you wrote, a medium sized bush is all I need, so grafting onto aronia made sense for me.
john S
PDX OR
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