8G 



ON THE BEST MEANS OP PRUNING TREES OF 

 NEGLECTED GROWTH. 



By the President, CHANDOS WKEN HOSKYNS, Esq. 



The recent notices in the proceedings of onr Club of the trees of Hereford- 

 shire most remarkable for size and beauty, suggested to me this opportunity of 

 saying a fewwords on a subject which, however important in reference to arbori- 

 culture itself as a branch of rural economy, would be less obviously appropriate 

 were it not for the cruelty which almost every educated eye witnesses with regret 

 in the treatment of full-grown or nearly full-grown trees whenever they are made 

 the subject of mutilation by the ordinary modes of pruning, and this especially 

 as seen along the sides of public roads. The fiat goes forth from the road, 

 surveyor that the trees adjoining the road should be lopped ; and forthwith there 

 commences a butchery, the results of which are the more vexatious because the 

 ruin inflicted on the timber in point of pecuniary and pictorial value is not only 

 incurable, but is quite unnecessary. 



I need hardly describe the evil, for almost everyone is familiar with it in 

 its two principal forms, either that of great scars left after the ruthless sawing off 

 of large branches from the stem of the tree (commonly known to timber 

 merchants by the jocular name of "owl's faces"), or the more elaborate mischief 

 of what is called snag-pruning, which leaves a dead stump from one to two feet 

 long, decaying year by year into the very heart of thetimber, offending the eye 

 far more than the honest barbarity of close-cutting. This snag-pruning is much 

 the worse of the two ; but both are most objectionable in this, that they are 

 perfectly unnecessary. Any branch, the removal of which is required, can be 

 removed from a tree not only without injury to the timber, but with compara- 

 tively small detriment even to the beauty of the tree, by the adoption of a little 

 patience and the practical use of a little knowledge. I have practised what I 

 recommend during 30 years — a generation — and I have never had a single instance 

 of failure. I will try to describe it in as few words as possible. 



Every branch of a tree has smaller branches of its own, and is, in fact, to 

 them a tree. Every naturalist knows that the trunk of a tree is fed by its 

 branches, just as a river is by its tributaries. If this one simple fact, viz., that 

 the growth of a tree is from its foliage, were known or even believed, by 

 woodmen {or whoever they may be who venture to practise amputation without 

 understanding the physiology of the plant), no such thing could ever occur as 

 a tree injured by pruning, either for value or for appearance. When any 

 offending branch is condemned, instead of proceeding by capital punishment, 

 (which admits of no repentance, except to the irtjlictorj, the humane process is 

 this. I said that every branch has its own branohlets. Select one of these latter, 

 which happens to grow in the most favourable direction, and at the point where 

 it springs take off the main branch with an oblique cut in the directioH of the 



