TRANSPLANTING TREES FROM THE WOODS. Perhaps it is a primitive instinct, though it is a defensible and lovable one, that impels the home-maker to straighten his back after digging an ample hole in the ground and betake him to the woods to get a tree to set out in it. The handsomest and the most grotesque of cultivated trees came originally from the wilds, somewhere and at some time.
Competition is sharp, and growth slow in thickly settled places. A little tree that grows in the open has the best chance for symmetry and normal development. The roots are not tangled with others. Choose it, unless it be one of those tap-rooted kinds whose probings extend deeper than strength and patience can dig. If it is one of the fibrous-rooted tribe, dig on, in all carefulness and faith. Cut a circle as wide as the tree's crown. This will leave most of the roots in the earth ball. There is tough sod above, which you will discard when the planting is finished. It helps to hold the earth intact now. It is a long job, but at last the tree is loose, and an extra bucketful of its familiar earth may be dug out for use in planting. A wheel barrow or a stone boat brings the tree home; and, if equal care surrounds the ceremonial of planting, it need never know of the change. Most trees submit to transplanting as if it were no ordeal. The safest way is to move them in their sleep—before the spring awakening, and while the earth is still solid and dry about the roots.
The capricious ones with long tap roots and few bqshy side branches must have special treatment. Small trees only are safely moved. It is wise to select the tree a year beforehand, and to cut off its tap root by a thrust of a sharp spade at a moderate depth. It is thus forced to branch above the cut, and the next spring you know just how deep to dig to get this new root system.
The magnolias and the tulip tree have fleshy, brittle roots which are easily bruised and broken if carelessly handled. Most evergreens die if their roots are exposed to the air. Yet all are successfully transplanted if pains are taken. The rhododendrons on Southern mountains are brought by carloads to Northern estates where they are set out with a loss of less than one per cent. Evergreens of middle age and large size are successfully trans planted in the growing season. It requires careful work and proper mechanical appliances to do these things, but there is no secret method. Whatever grows in the neighbouring woods may be safely trusted to thrive in home grounds unless violent changes in soil, shade and moisture conditions are made. Even then, some surprises are in store for the experimenting planter. Such water-loving trees as black ash, cottonwood, willow, sycamore and red maple do well in upland soil. Where transplanting from the wild is practicable, one is justified in experimenting at the cost of occasional failure. It is a part of wild gardening; it has a piquant charm that can't be bought with money. "Cheaper at the nursery," calls a neighbour, but the man with the spade and wheelbarrow goes along to the woods. This is his heart's holiday.
Trees differ by families and species in the tenacity of their hold on life. Those with a tendency to strike root from joints of the stem bear much abuse of roots. Such are most willows
and poplars, basswood, osage orange and mulberry. In general, trees with many fibrous roots are most successfully transplanted. If the main branches are short and extend laterally, making a shallow but dense root system, the chances are best. If there is a long tap root going straight down, with but sparse side branches for feeding roots, difficulties and danger beset the transplanting. The maples and elms illustrate the first class; hickories and white oaks the second. " You can't transplant an oak too early nor an elm too late," is Evelyn's assurance, very old but still true.
A comparatively recent discovery is that certain families of plants depend for their soil food upon the ministrations of fungi, whose threads invest the rootlets completely, and have long been mistaken for the root hairs themselves. So intimate is the contact of this mycorh4a with the rootlets that the crude sap absorbed by the fungus from the soil is conducted to the leaves for manu facture into sugar and starch. The return current of sap nourishes not only the plant above ground and its root system, but also the mycorhiza, which has no green tissues, and therefore no way of elaborating plant food taken in the raw state. Each organism serves the other's vital need. Without the fungus the tree would probably die, and vice versa.
The beech exhibits this notably among trees. So do the oaks, most of the conifers, and even certain of the willows and poplars. The great heath family, including laurels, rhododen drons, wintergreen and trailing arbutus, are believed to exhibit this "symbiosis," or interdependence between fungi and roots.
Moving such trees is precarious work, because the welfare of both tree and fungus must be looked after. If the mycorhiza dries out, the tree dies. If the tree is planted in soil destitute of this fungus, that brought in the earth ball often proves in adequate to the demands of the treetop. Most trees of this type grow naturally in great colonies, crowding out other kinds. The soil under beech woods is one great network of delicate fungous threads. An isolated beech tree taken to your garden sustains a great shock and a trying deprivation. No wonder trailing arbutus usually dies in domestication. The range of species exhibiting symbiosis is not very definitely known yet. It is certainly very large, and students are busy upon the problem. Many plants, however, feed with their own roots, and are therefore independent of organisms in the soil. So far as we know, most trees belong to the latter class.
The whole philosophy of transplanting is the keeping of the root system in ignorance of the change. The ideal way is to save all the roots. The practical way is to save as many as possible.
The trunk roots and their branches are important as a frame work to support the tree in the ground and the rootlets at their extremities. But only the season's rootlets absorb plant food. Next year they, too, will pass the feeding function on to newer filaments of more delicate structure. The year-old roots become conductors but no longer gatherers of food. Each year's growth underground has had its turn, since the main branches were the tender first branchings of the radicle of the germinating seed.