GOOD AND BAD PRUNING. 



GOOD AND BAD PRUNING. 



The annexed wood-cuts will explain the effects of judicious and injudicious 

 pruning better than a lengthened disquisition. Fig. 1 represents a tree of thirty 

 years' growth, which has been regularly and properly pruned. Fig. 2, a tree of 

 the same age, which has been neglected as to pruning during its early growth, and 

 has now been pruned in a way too frequently practised — namely, by sawing and 

 lopping off the branches, after they have attained a large size. Fig. 3 shows the 



Fig. 3. 



bad consequences of neglecting early pruning, in the case of a plank cut from an 

 ash-tree which had been pruned by lopping off the large branches many years 

 before it was felled. The cuts in this case had been made several inches from the 

 bole, and the branches being very large, the stumps left had become rotten. The 

 enlargement of the trunk had not, however, been stopped, for the new wood had 

 covered over all the haggled parts, in some places to several inches thick. Yet 

 the effects of the previous exposure to the action of the weather, by injudicious 

 pruning, is strikingly marked by the decayed state of the parts connected with 

 the branches which had been amputated ; progressive pruning of deciduous trees, 

 commenced while they are young, if it is to be practised at all, will produce no 

 such blemishes when the timber is cut up. In a school for gardeners, or indeed in 

 every school, these effects should be demonstrated by examples of bad pruning ; 

 the best collection of such is to be found in the economic museum of Sir William 

 Hooker's foundation at Kew Gardens, but it would be very easy to collect 

 for exhibition at horticultural societies and State or county fairs. 



YoL. YI.— March, 1856. 



