This is an old thread, but I thought I'd respond to it anyway.
I'm a fan of medlars and grafted about 100 or so trees last year of it for our orchard. I believe we've got six different cultivars of medlar from the initial grafting and I added a couple more trees this year of a seventh cultivar that originated in Iran. The original grafts are now about a year and a half old and began branching out after just the first growing season.
They appear to be pretty disease and pest-free and most have flowered after just one year. Not many have put out fruit, but a few have.
The varieties I grafted all came from the
Medlar collection that's part of the Nat'l Germplasm Repository. Anyone can request dormant scionwood and could graft trees themselves. You'd simply need to buy separate rootstocks on which to graft. Medlars are closely related to hawthorne and many people grafting medlars will graft onto hawthorne rootstock which is what I did. I grafted onto two hawthorne rootstocks: Crataegus monogyna and Crataegus crus-galli. Of the two, I recommend the C. crus-galli. You can obtain young trees of this to be used as rootstock from
Lawyer Nursery.
The fruit, by the way, taste like a spiced applesauce. But they need to be 'bletted' (or allowed to begin breaking down) before the pulp of the fruit is at its peak.
Here are photos of a medlar tree, medlar blossoms, and medlar fruit:
It's a fruit tree well worth growing.
John