Propagating Fruit Plants

Heritage Fruit Growing #1

C. Thornton

Anyone can easily multiply their own rare and heritage fruit trees and shrubs for selling, sharing or growing their own mini-orchard. This handbook shows you how.

Covering such topics as propagation by seeds, suckers, layers, cuttings, eye-cuttings, root-cuttings and division, this book utilises the vast knowledge of 19th century writer David Alexander Crichton.

Crichton was the official Australian government expert and lecturer upon ‘Fruit Culture’. His book The Australasian Fruit Culturist (1893) is well worth reading more than a century later.

This more recent handbook is one of a series written for ‘backyard farmers’ of the 21st century.

The series focuses on rare and heritage fruit in Australia, although it includes much information of interest to fruit enthusiasts around the world. ‘Heritage’ or ‘heirloom’ fruits such as old-fashioned varieties of apple, quince, fig, plum, peach and pear are increasingly popular due to their diverse flavours, excellent nutritional qualities and other desirable characteristics. They are part of our horticultural, vintage and culinary inheritance.

To pick a tree-ripened heritage fruit from your own back yard and bite into it is to experience the taste of fresh food as our forefathers knew it. During the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries fruit diversity was huge, but in modern supermarkets only a limited range of commercial fruit varieties is now available to consumers.

Heritage, heirloom and rare fruit enthusiasts across the world are currently reviving our horticultural legacy by renovating old orchards and identifying ‘lost’, unusual and historic fruit varieties. The goal is to make a much wider range of fruit trees available again to the home gardener.

This series of handbooks aims to help.