PETER SEABROOK
Grafting could create the perfect sunflower, says Peter
PRETTY well all tree fruits are budded or grafted onto specific rootstocks to control size – and in the case of MM rootstocks for apples, to control pests. We have family fruit trees with several cultivars grafted onto the one trunk, a good way to get cross-pollination where there is only room for one tree.
Aubergines, peppers and tomatoes are now grafted onto vigorous and disease-resistant roots. Digging out a grafted tomato recently, I was interested to see the roots stretched out over a metre to indicate this vigour.
Roses are budded onto seedling stocks, and grapes are grafted onto disease-resistant roots.
This summer, I have been trying out grafting different cultivars of sunflower onto strong-stemmed, seed-raised garden sunflowers. I had seen this done at a Scandinavian university, and wondered how difficult it would be to graft this year’s multi-flowering, short-lived perennial Helianthus ‘Sunbelievable’ onto a taller-growing annual cultivar.
If this could be done we would have a standard sunflower, much as we have standard roses, to give height to borders. The root parent chosen was F1 hybrid Helianthus ‘Helios Flame’, a pollen-free bicolour growing to 6ft (1.8m), although sowing quite late on 6th May and then keeping the seedlings in pots reduced their height somewhat.
Once a metre or so high, the tops were cut off and a saddle graft was used on one and a wedge on the other. Healthy young shoots of H. ‘Sunbelievable’ were then prepared as scions and held in place with a strip of polythene. A white polythene bag was secured over the scion and graft to maintain humidity, and in two weeks the graft had united.
“Sunbelievable can produce over 1,000 flowers on one plant”