scionwood

What is Scionwood?

Scionwood is cuttings from a tree of the desired variety that it grafted onto another tree or rootstock. The scion is usually dormant at this stage and harvested in late winter.

If you took a seed from a good apple and planted it, the apples from the resulting tree would most likely be sour duds. That's because that apple has two parents, and the kids will be much different than the parent or their other siblings, and unfortunately often turn out bad.

To propagate a distinct variety, it must be cloned. This is done by taking a cutting and grafting it onto another host. Apple varieties have been propagated this way since the Egyptians, and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were avid grafters. It is the only way to reproduce a variety to get a tree exactly like the host tree.

3/10/09 We've come to the realization that we're not very good at supplying scionwood. Since we focus on testing, a lot of varieties our trees are small and do not produce a lot of usable wood. We have to use what we have to fill our tree orders and end up running out of a lot of varieties on some scionwood orders.

Because of this we recommend you order from the good people at Maple Valley Orchards www.maplevalleyorchards.com who have given us excellent service on our scionwood orders. We can no longer ship scionwood.

A scionwood stick grafted onto a rootstock to make a new tree.

Ein Sheimer apple tree topworked with Arkansas Black. The graft obtained almost the size of the original tree in one season (one side gets cut off).

Besides starting a new tree, scionwood can be used for changing the variety of an old tree, a process called topworking. This is often used in older apple orchards of Red Delicious to switch them over to a more trendy variety such as Fuji. On established trees it is much faster than planting new trees and waiting for them to bear fruit, as the topworked trees have massive root systems that will grow out branches and fruit the next year.

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Question: What about multi-graft trees, or 4-in-1 that have multiple varieties grafted onto one tree?

Unfortunately in Southern California we have not had good success with multi-grafted trees. The varieties better suited to our climate blossom earlier and seem to divert the tree's energy at the expense of the other varieties. The branch of that variety grows rapidly while the others have little to no growth at all.

Other so-called "high chill" varieties will not blossom or fruit when used on a multi-graft, but fruit just fine when grafted onto their own dwarfing rootstock. This is too bad, as a multi-graft tree is a big space saver if you're wanting to have a lot of different varieties.

All is not lost however, as apple trees can be planted close together, and there are methods to cram a lot of apple trees into a little space. We suggest you see our espalier page and consider a Belgian Fence, which is quite ornamental and functional besides producing a lot of different apples.