NATURE'S PRUNING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 9 May 1913, Page 6

NATURE'S PRUNING.

Wind and weather are Nature's implements in her annual task of tree pruning. Not only leaves, hut twigs and branches have to fall, but the whole tree is not to become a dense nil ass resembling a huge solid besom, a witch's broom, as is found sometimes disfiguring the lady biroh. In a very interesting magazine article written and illustrated by Henry Irving, there is a calculation of how moch growth would follow in ten years from one singe shoot" assuming that there was no natural oheck upon a. tree's increase. Starting from a shoot possessing one terminal and two lateral buds, he shows that while in its second year it will produce three formal shoots, each again possessing at the least one terminal and two lateral buds, by the end of the tenth year there will be the surprising number of 19,683, as the direct outgrowth of the primary sinjj? shoot. "Each tree would thus be a solid mound of witches' brooms, and nothing else, if we could, by stretch of imagination, conceive it as completing ten years of such multiplication. Within much less than the half of a hundred years, the production of branches, at this rate, would be such that no terms' of ours could express their multitude." The disadvantage would be that no tree could live out the first ten years, being early smothered in its own excess. In actual fact no ten-year-old branch will be found to bear more than some two hundred such outgrowths. "So effective are the existing checks upon increase that for every hundred resulting twigs-that-would-be one only survives." Spring winds are the first operators. They exercise a drying influence upon the swelling shoots, which results in a steady and persistent disbudding. "Multitudes of buds are literally 'sucked dry.' " . The sap supply is diverted from these, and goes to nourish the comparative few which happen to survive. Later the superfluous growth is again reduced by lack of light, certain under-boughs I>eing bound to perish in the shade. Wind, hail and heavy rain are excellent priming knives. Frost, snow, insects, birds, are also agencies by which the production of twigs and branches is kept back, and hard seasons, apparently inimical and injurious to the life of trees, may l>e supremely necessary for their health and vigour, securing space for each branch it. retains to become a shapely and graceful figure, over arid about with the air and light have free play.'