My family has had a large potted orange tree for 60+ years, and they have never seen it flower. Now that it's in my care, and I am more equipped to care for the plant, I am wondering if the reason for it not flowering is because it's so old. I gave it its first repotting in several years in the spring, and it is a full on bonsai in a 30 gallon pot. Container citrus seems to flower no problem, so I still suspect the plant is just too old to flower.

If my goal is to get oranges, would I be better off using my propagations from the mother plant as root stock and grafting some known varieties? I don't know the variety of the plant, I assume it was seed grown and just stuck around all these years as a beloved houseplant. But I don't have a lot of experience with citrus so I am not sure.

Yeah... I've seed grown citrus for like a decade or better without ever seeing flowers...

Good question... I think seed growing other trees for use as rootstock would be better that using cuttings for the purpose...

I suggest trying hardy orange (Citrus trifoliata) as a root stock...
https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/pl...

You may even have it growing nearby...

Seed grown citrus trees can take up to 20 years to first fruit - you can tell when that's going to happen because they lose their thorns.

Then they produce for 25 years, far short of life expectancy (up to 100 years). Trifoliate has been the rootstock of choice for a long time but sour orange is gaining in popularity. Trifoliate is too aggressive a grower - it doesn't want to be relegated to rootstock status.

You might be successful rooting some cuttings. The only reason for grafting trees is to add some characteristic missing in the original: size limits, ability to live in certain soils or temperatures outside its normal range....

Lucy68 said: Seed grown citrus trees can take up to 20 years to first fruit - you can tell when that's going to happen because they lose their thorns.

Then they produce for 25 years, far short of life expectancy (up to 100 years). Trifoliate has been the rootstock of choice for a long time but sour orange is gaining in popularity. Trifoliate is too aggressive a grower - it doesn't want to be relegated to rootstock status.

You might be successful rooting some cuttings. The only reason for grafting trees is to add some characteristic missing in the original: size limits, ability to live in certain soils or temperatures outside its normal range....

I have one large air layering that is a good-sized bonsai in its own right, and several smaller normal cuttings that have rooted recently. Any reason I can't just graft known bud wood onto the air layering?
I can get a variety of citrus just to use as root stock, like trifoliate, but would hate to do so when I already have a group of cuttings I took from my unknown plant to use as root stock.

I think seed grown root stock would have better roots, and better chance of success.
but... try with rooted cuttings if you want.

If you really want to graft, these days the rootstock is also an unrooted cutting. Graft the bud wood onto a rootstock cutting and root the whole cutting.