4 PRACTICAL TREE REPAIR 



The history of the treatment of wounds and 

 cavities in trees is of slight importance, but is 

 still of considerable interest. Although it in all 

 probability dates almost as far back as does the 

 cultivation of fruit trees, the writer has not 

 happened to stumble on any but the most meager 

 references dating from earlier than the end of the 

 Eighteenth Century. What might be called the 

 modern history of the art begins, very regrettably, 

 with charges and denials of quackery. Mr. 

 William Forsyth, for many years king's gardener 

 at Kensington, whose name has been immortalized 

 in the form Forsythia, about the year 1800 dis- 

 covered that a mixture of such plebeian materials 

 as cow-dung, lime, and wood-ashes was a sovereign 

 cure for wounds, and he even claimed that by its 

 use " holes in trees may be brought to such a 

 degree of soundness that no one can know the new 

 wood from the old." Skeptics appeared and 

 many open letters were hurled back and forth. 

 Contemporary continental books on fruit growing 

 described more promising dressings, and the 

 systems of wound treatment they laid down were 

 surprisingly sound in principle. An Englishman, 

 Wm. Pontey, in his "Forest Primer," 1805, 

 equals most modern writers in his grasp of basic 

 principles. He advocates making pruning cuts 

 close to the trunk, as is now universally done, and 

 insists that cuts must be allowed to dry before they 



