Purpose

• Pears and Cherries: Both Asexually PropagatedImage by Flickr.com, courtesy of Gordana Adamovic-Mladenovic
  
  In some plants, including fruit trees such as apples, pears, cherries, olives and plums, sexual reproduction and planting from saved seeds would mean the loss of the fruits' desirable characteristics. If you plant a fuji apple seed, for instance, the apples from the new tree would resemble crabapples more than fujis. Since all the apple genes are still present in the seed and only some are expressed, they revert back to the expression of their "wild" genes within a generation.
  
  

History

• Olive TreeImage by Flickr.com, courtesy of Olivier
  
  Because it is essential for maintaining the characteristics humans love, including sweet flavor and textures ranging from juicy to crunchy, asexual propagation of fruit trees has been practiced since pre-classical times. Spreading from China, the ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about it extensively. Olive and fig trees were propagated in biblical times.
  
  

Grafting

• When grafting fruit trees, it is best to select a root base or "rootstock" that will grow well in the soil conditions of the region. Then, a branch or bud from the tree with desirable fruit characteristics is fused onto the rootstock tree in the spring or summer so that the wood from the two trees fuse permanently.
  
  

Rooting

• When rooting a fruit tree, the entire tree you are growing comes from a cutting of the tree you'd like to propagate. You can use a rooting hormone to help rooting begin. Branches from a young tree are more likely to root successfully than those from an old tree.
  
  

Layering

• Layering is sometimes more successful than rooting. Similar to rooting, you take a cutting of a tree and allow it to form its own roots. But in layering, you make sure that the daughter cutting is still attached to the parent tree at the time of rooting, and it is only severed once the new tree is established.