Graft Compatibility in Woody Plants: An Expanded Perspective

Four thousand years of practice and research in grafting woody plants have not provided significant answers to questions about the causes of graft incompatibility nor allowed valid predictions to be made regarding potential incompatibilities between individual plants of most species of landscape trees. In this paper, the author briefly reviews some of the more recent research findings dealing with graft success and failure and discusses three areas of research that have heretofore not been adequately studied. These are (a) wound compartmentalization, (b) girdling, and (c) lignification.