grafting?

[weekendwellies]

I was just reading the post about thorniest fruit for a boundary, and it got me thinking.
I have gooseberries which I ALWAYS get ripped to shreds by when I am collecting the fruits, and my neighbor has a rose (or possibly had) (it may have accidentally got weedkillered) which looked gorgeous, but was lethal when I was trying to cut back the neighbour's ivy that was growing over our dividing wall and up the side of my house. (The rose was entwined in the ivy).
So anyway, I was thinking, if you have something smallish like the gooseberries, but would like them to grow taller, for a natural barrier, is it possible to graft them onto something else that would give it some height.
I know you can graft different varieties of apples, pears, etc to the one root stock; I have seen multiple varieties of apple on one trunk, but does it always have to be the same type of fruit. Could you have apples, pears, plums, etc all growing on one rooting stock?

Juszt read the mad multi trees thread, much the same idea as I had!

[Mell]

The short answer is the fruits need to be fairly closely related for a sucessful long lasting graft. To get a extra tall gooseberry would probably take years of research to find the right combination. Even apple to apple give various degrees of compatibility.

The Mad multigraft would rely of unusually high degrees of cross species compatability, for example the apple winter banana reputedly will work well as an interscion (grafting bridge) between most apple and some pears, so to get specific combination you might go apple , winter banana, bartlett pear, other pear. . As a general rule though apart from the combination I listed, others will fail either immediatly or after a while.

Hence why I'm in search of other interscions or writings that give clues as to how they might have done it !