My nam doc mai did the same thing this year. A single bloom spike coming right out of the trunk. All of the flowers dried up and died on mine.

Ah,ok,probably will happen here too. Thanks!

Flowering below the graft line on a juvenile tree is pretty rare. I remember Har M mentioning it was a 1 in 1000 occurrence for Julie trees, slightly more rare on the nam doc mai and even more rare on other cultivars. I had one julie that did that and then croaked a couple of months later.

Jeff

How was the above graft tree looking Jeff? It went from healthy to dead? Mine looks healthy-not stressed other than it could be warmer-me and the tree would agree on that.

Sorry, Jeff you are right. It was my Julie. Mine was actually above the graft. I meant to take a pic of it but they flowers dried up before I had a chance.

Mine was actually flowering below the graft (from the rootstock), which is interesting because the rootstock would have only been about 18 months old. At first I thought it could lend some credence to Laymond Hardy's hormone theory. The tree did croak a couple of months later despite looking very healthy up to that point. I later realized that I had killed it with too much fert (Julie trees can be overly sensitive to fertlizer).

Jeff

Another possibility is that the tree is double grafted, and the flowering is in the intermediate trunk.

Adiel

My tree was not a double graft. Flowering from the rootstock on young trees is an infrequent occurrence, but it does happen. Har M explained that it happens on about 1 in every 1,000 to 2,000 trees in the case of Julie, sometimes even occurring on 6 month old trees. In my case the stress cased by extra fert probably bumped it into the 1 in 1,000 group.

You should read some of Laymond Hardy's writings. Many believe him to be on the 'eccentric' side (for lack of a better word). But his 'hormone' experiments are a bit interesting. He would do funny things like put mature budwood in a blender and then inject the solution into the trunk of a juvenile citrus seedling to induce early blooming.

Jeff

To update: A SECOND flowering stalk has appeared..and it has a small -tiny-Mango. The above grafts Mangos dont look to be adding size-same size as a month ago. I'm worried the tree is about to go bad.
I should rub off the low shoots...just soooo curious what this all really means.

Reading that article makes me want to do an experiment with my 3 year old pantin mamey sapote seedling. I might try to get a syringe. When my grafted pace mamey blooms, I'll take pieces of leaves, cambium, mamey blossoms and dump them all into distilled bottled water and mix them in a blender. Filter the debris out of it and poor it into the syringe and inject it right under the bark into the cambium of the mamey seedling like the article suggests. Lets see what happens...