220 



Budding and Grafting. — If is a common practice among nursery- 

 men to bud or graft lilacs on roots, plants, or cuttings of privet — 

 partly because it results in a salable plant in a shorter time. Some- 

 times the growth of lilac the first year following its graftage 

 upon privet is almost phenomenal. In my back yard the variety 

 Lamartine, budded in August at ground level on a young privet 

 bush, had by the fall of the following year attained a height of five 



teet. Idle objection to privet as an 

 understock is that lilacs "rafted on 

 it sometimes suffer from a disease 

 known as graft-blight (See p. 224). 

 I lowcver, this defect can be over- 

 come without too much difficulty by 

 proper handling by the nurseryman 

 to ensure that the lilac ultimately 

 forms its own root system and 

 chokes out that of the privet, ddiis 

 involves setting the plants deeper in 

 the soil every time they are trans- 

 planted and, if necessary, cutting off 

 the privet roots when the lilac has 

 formed a sufficiency of its own. 



A method ot quickly producing 

 lilacs on their own roots was de- 

 vised by C. E. Kern, a nursery- 

 man ot Wyoming, Ohio. This 

 Fig. 12. ./. Lilac winter- involves the use of privet (either 



7 T ; lft on pdvet ' callused. B. California or common) as a tempo- 

 Lilac grafted on privet : first , , 



, rary understock to serve as a 



season s growth. 



"nurse" until a sufficiency of 



lilac roots has been formed. The technique is fully described in 

 the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, American Plant Propaga- 

 tors Association, July 22nd, 1931. Briefly, a rooted portion of 

 privet two and a half to three inches long is cut to a wedge shape 

 at the top. The lilac scion containing two or three pairs of buds is 

 split and the wedge of the understock is slipped into the cleft. The 

 grafts are tied in the usual way and stored, buried in a moist me- 

 dium (sand, peatmoss, etc.), in a cool cellar. In the spring they are 



