112 SYMBIOGENESIS 



on adequate symbiotics and, in the case of the tree in 

 particular, on its "work" of drawing efficiently on the soil. 

 In that sense it is true indeed that: "The flower must drink 

 the nature of the soil before it can put forth its blossoming." 

 So long as such ancestral dynamics continue, the tree retains 

 its main character, its vitality, its definite and co-operative 

 vascular arrangements, its power to reproduce from seeds, 

 ability to send out new roots from its stem, and its vital 

 symbiotic correspondences ; characters and assets which are 

 in the course of disintegration in the case of the grafted tree 

 which does not draw directly on the soil. That the provision of 

 intimacy of contact between soil and root system, in which I 

 see a means of restoring symbiotics, is of surpassing 

 importance, may now be gleaned from Mr. Pickering's remarks 

 on the need of particular care of such contact in transplanting 

 trees. 



Two other conclusions may also be drawn from what has been 

 mentioned, namely, that it can make little or no difference to the future 

 welfare of the tree whether the ends of the old roots are trimmed or 

 left jagged and torn, as they are when removed from the nursery, nor 

 whether these roots are carefully spread out in the ground instead of 

 being huddled into the hole prepared for them, for it is the new 

 rootlets which are to be formed, and not the old ones on which the 

 future life of the tree depends. Both these conclusions have been veri- 

 fied by actual experiment. Even when the roots were twisted and tied 

 together in a bundle, the tree did just as well as when they were spread 

 out in the orthodox fashion. 



It is thus seen that all these practices which are supposed to be 

 essential to the proper planting of a tree are really immaterial, and, 

 in fact, that the violation of them within certain limits is beneficial. 

 But the benefit was not sufficient to explain certain results which we 

 obtained, and which puzzled us for many years. We had made a plan- 

 tation in which, by way of demonstration, the trees had been planted 

 in violation of all the accepted canons, and we expected that these 

 trees would afford an awful lesson to the careless planter. But instead 

 of that, they flourished rather better than their carefully planted neigh- 

 bours. The results were naturally set aside as accidental, and a 

 repetition, and subsequently many repetitions, were made, but the 

 roughly-planted trees refused to behave badly and flourished so much 

 more than their neighbours that they often showed two or three times 



