The Simple Arts of Budding and Grafting 
A MEANS OF SECURING BETTER VARIETIES OF FRUIT AS WELL AS LARGER YIELDS—THE UN¬ 
CERTAINTY OF GROWTH FROM SEED COMPARED WITH THE ASSURED RESULTS OF GRAFTED STOCK 
by Claude H. Miller 
Photographs by Charles Jones 
T HE possibilities of pleasure as well as profit in the home 
fruit garden are greatly increased if its owner understands 
the art of grafting and budding. Both of these processes are ex¬ 
tremely simple and require but little skill or dexterity. The gen¬ 
eral rule of professional fruit culturists is to propagate the stone 
fruits by budding and the seed bearing fruits by grafting, but 
these laws are by no means as inflexible as those of the Medes 
and Persians. 
In recent years great progress has been made in both of these 
methods of raising fruits true to name. Most of the nut trees, 
chestnuts, hickory nuts, pecans and so on, that we now obtain 
from the nurseries are from grafted stock. In passing it might 
be said that when the student can successfully graft a shellbark 
hickory scion on a wild pignut sapling he is ready to graduate. 
A beginner had better confine his efforts to fruit trees such as 
peaches, plums and apples before attempting nut culture. 
Budding is easier than grafting. The latter is usually done in 
the spring, just before the buds begin to swell, but budding can 
be practiced at any time when the bark is loose enough to peel, 
and is usually done in mid-summer because at that time well-de¬ 
veloped buds can 
be secured. To go 
back to fundamen¬ 
tals, the principle 
of b o t h budding 
and grafting is to 
unite to a young 
growing tree of 
some unknown or 
undesirable variety, 
a small portion of 
the bark or twig of 
a desirable sort so 
that the two will 
unite to form a 
new branch which 
can be trained to 
form the head of 
the tree. It is one 
of the mysteries of 
nature that al¬ 
though the stock 
upon which the 
graft is made may 
be a comparatively 
large tree, and the 
bud or scion which 
is grafted no larger 
than a pin head, 
the ultimate tree 
w h i c h will grow 
from this union 
will possess the 
qualities of the tree 
from which the 
scion or bud is 
taken, and not be 
influenced at all by the stock upon which it grows after budding. 
The practical value of propagating fruits in this way instead 
of by growing from seeds is due to the fact that if we attempt 
to grow a tree by planting the apple seed for instance, we can not 
be at all sure that the tree which may grow will bear fruit at all 
similar to the kind which bore the seed. It all depends upon the 
kind of pollen the bee was carrying that effected the fertilization 
of the blossom. It thus becomes pure guesswork and absolutely 
unreliable. Seeds from the most lucious greening or pound-sweet 
may produce a tree which will bear only the meanest little apples 
in no way resembling their parent. It is necessary, therefore, 
if we wish to propagate fruit trees of known varieties to resort 
to a method more certain than growing from seeds or pits. 
The parent stock, that is, the stock upon which the budding is 
done, is usually a seedling tree two or three years old. All we 
shall need for an outfit for budding is a sharp knife, some raffia 
and a “bud stick." August is in most cases'the best month to prac¬ 
tice budding, as at that time well developed buds may be secured. 
We must first of all have seedlings upon which to bud. These 
should be transplanted into nursery rows after the first season’s 
