THE PRUNING OF TREES. Pruning is the cutting out of parts of a tree for the improve ment of the parts that remain. Cleaning might better designate the removal of dead wood. Trimming is the shaping of the out line, as the shearing of hedges and individuals of box and yew into formal or grotesque figures. Training is the bringing of the tree to some desired arrangement of its limbs, as the espalier fruit trees, that lie flat against a wall in European gardens.
All green plants need sun and air, as well as room for roots. Trees crowd out other plants in close forests. Where thousands of saplings start in a plot of woodland, only hundreds reach middle life, and only tens, maturity. In every treetop the story of continuous thinning is repeated. The trunk and limbs are full of knots which the bark has healed over. They are records of twigs and large branches that failed. A dozen apple blossoms make up a single cluster. Two or three apples at most mature, and they are inferior to the apple that grows alone, sole survivor of the dozen May promises. Every well-grown leaf nurses a bud at its base. Next year these buds send out shoots, each with leaves that nurture other buds. These twigs are stifled by the crowding. The weaklings die. On the stronger ones the leaves in the shade turn yellow and fall. The weak buds fail even to start in spring. As the tree's crown grows larger, many branches are overshadowed. Their leaves languish and die. The whole bough declines, and at length snaps off. Nature sacrifices the many to the few—the weak for the good of the strong. It is the law of the survival of the fittest.
Pruning is a practice we learn directly from Nature. Yet
there are those who decry it as "unnatural"! The difference is that man does a much better job—where he knows what he is about. The quack tree doctor, alas! too often takes the case, and then it were far better to have let Nature manage the affair herself. The peripatetic tree pruner is almost always a tree butcher, a menace to the well-being of any self-respecting, tree loving community. He preys upon the good intentions and the credulity of the public. His glibness passes for scientific knowledge with people who are themselves ignorant of the life and the needs of their trees. Too often they succumb to his arguments and let him scrape and hack and doctor the trees as he sees fit. It is probably an indignant neighbour who expatiates on the havoc wrought. The dazed owner, with flattened purse and a sense of failure and disillusion, bewails what cannot be undone. The tree pruner is gone, so the vengeance that should cut short his profitable career follows him afar off.
This is plain justice to the family and to the community and to the trees:—If a tree is worth pruning at all it is worth the owner's while to inform himself as to the best method and then stand by and see that his directions are carried out, unless there is some man of well-known intelligence who can be trusted to do it properly. We shall come to recognise one day that the trees of a community are common property in the best sense, and no man has a right to prune them or cut them down unless he acts as a duly appointed representative of all the people.