Have you had the pleasure of seeing the multicoloured Living Bouquet of our Sunrise Magic Frangipani up close? If so, you’re one of the lucky people on this planet who’s witnessed the fruit (or flower) of our years of careful research and experimentation with multi-grafting.
For centuries, agriculturalists and horticulturalists have strived to encourage the best traits in plants using whatever techniques were available to them. Selective breeding is the reason why the modern banana is seedless, for instance! Grafting, on the other hand, allows separate plants to be merged into a single new plant with combined traits from those that make it up.
The process is fairly simple if you want a simple result: join a scion from one plant to the rootstock of another, nurture and wait. Multigrafting raises the stakes as the process has to be successfully repeated several times on each plant with careful control to ensure a consistent outcome.
In the case of Sunrise Magic, we selected complimentary flowers for the perfect living frangipani bouquet that grows on the tree in all the colours of the sunrise. It took over a decade but we managed to synchronise flowering and maximise the delightful fragrances of each bloom for a breathtaking result.
We may call it multi-grafting, but it’s just shy of magic!