Summer Operations Beneficial to Plantations. 1 5 



tion, especially one of the mixed kind so generally adopted, and when 

 the closely intertwined nurses of evergreen growth form so impenetrable 

 a screen to air and light, are in precisely the same condition as those 

 which have been subjected to unnecessary and severe destruction of 

 leaves, because from their surroundings they are deficient in an amount 

 of leaf surface adequate for the elaboration of the sap thrown into their 

 system by the roots, and consequently the amount of wood formed 

 annually will be considerably less than in such trees as stand apart, 

 and whose leaves are more fully exposed to the very necessary action 

 of both air and light. The system we advocate has long been prac- 

 tised with marked success in some of the largest plantations in the 

 county of Dumfries, and which are acknowledged to be the best 

 managed in that district. 



At all times opposed to the lopping off or pruning of heavy limbs 

 in large trees where it can be avoided, it appears to be only a truism to 

 say, that were young plantations regularly gone over every summer, 

 and the individual trees treated when necessary in the care- 

 ful manner we have indicated, there would very seldom in after years 

 when the trees have attained to some height, arise the necessity for 

 pruning them in the manner so frequently done, and leaving awkward 

 excrescences on their trunks by the removal of large limbs, thus mar- 

 ring the picturesque beauty of nature, and endangering the future 

 health of the tree. It is with trees after they have attained to a con- 

 siderable growth, and lost that adolescent form of bark peculiar to the 

 young tree, as it is with the human system when severe operations 

 become necessary ; for it is not generally understood that aged trees, 

 and those heyoncl their inime, will stand the mutilations of the wood- 

 man's saw or pruning-knife better than vigorous, healthy trees, operated 

 upon before they have attained their full development. Surgical hos- 

 pital statistics tell us that cases of amputation of the leg or arm — 

 when performed between the ages of thirty and fifty years — are fatal 

 in the proportion of one in every two cases, while between the ages 

 of fifty and sixty-five, the same operations prove unsuccessful only in 

 the proportion of one in every four cases, and as against one in everv 

 five cases in children or young lives: and so it is in the treatment 

 of tree pruning ; and if statistics were collected of such work, there is 

 no doubt the successful operations would be found marvellously more 

 numerous among either the cases of light foreshortening and disbudding 

 of young trees from under fifteen to twenty feet in height, during the 

 summer months, or of very old trees, which may have had large limbs 

 removed during the ordinary winter season process, than in the cases 

 of vigorous growing trees of from thirty years old and upwards, pruned 

 even under the most favourable aspects both in regard to mode of 

 execution and season. 



