Graft punk: Breaking the law to help urban trees bear fruit

from Grist:



Graft punk: Breaking the law to help urban trees bear fruit
By Twilight Greenaway


Ornamental fruit trees are the worst idea ever. And I’d argue they say a lot about our culture. As we’ve built and expanded cities, and planted public trees, we’ve decided that local fruit — fruit you could pick right on the street — was too messy. We wanted our fruit imported, wrapped in plastic, and safely compartmentalized in the produce aisle. So we bred trees accordingly. Pear trees with no pears. Cherry trees with no cherries.

Now this San Francisco-based group called the Guerrilla Grafters is challenging the very notion of the ornamental fruit tree. And they’re working outside the law (city officials don’t like rotten fruit on the sidewalk, nor the liability it suggests). They’re covertly grafting — a practice of connecting two branches in a way that will allow their vascular tissues to join together — fruit tree limbs onto the trunks of ornamental cherry, plum, and pear trees. (We’ve highlighted them before on Grist, but since NPR covered their illegal work again this weekend, I thought it was worth another mention.)

Grafting is fairly invisible to most city dwellers’ eyes, making it an easy, subtle way to fill a neighborhood with fruit-bearing branches over time. But grafting also makes sense on other levels. A strong root system takes time to develop, so branches grafted onto mature trees will grow faster and bear more fruit than they would on young trees. In other words, adding back the fruiting function to established trees (which are also already absorbing carbon dioxide from the air), makes way more sense than tearing out ornamentals and starting from scratch. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/food/graft-punk-breaking-the-law-to-help-urban-trees-bear-fruit/