POLLARDING. 399 



Exploitation at longer intervals than that of a single year is 

 attended with several capital disadvantages, the principal of which 

 are absolute impossibility of keeping the clumps properly thinned 

 out and withdrawal of a very considerable portion of the produc- 

 tive area from exploitation ; hence reduced yield, inferior size of 

 the shoots, difficult extraction, and much damage in exploitation. 

 Although the system has many powerful advocates and is also very 

 largerly practised, its necessity has still to be justified. If the 

 demand is insignificant in comparison with the annual production, 

 the principle of given rest is entirely redundant, and if, on the- 

 other hand, the demand is large enough to require careful conser- 

 vancy and working, prices will always be high enough to pay for 

 the careful style of cutting required by the system of annual ex- 

 ploitation. Moreover, in the latter case, exploitation at longer 

 intervals than that of one year would mean heavy overcuttiug in; 

 the open areas. 



SECTION V. 

 Pollarding. 



Pollarding can be considered only by courtesy as a mode of 

 reproduction, for by it new individual trees are not produced, but 

 merely a new crop of branches, which never cease to remain a 

 part of the crown of the original parent stem. 



1. Formation and exploitation of pollards. 



A pollard may be formed by taking off the entire crown of a tree 

 or only the leafy portion of the larger branches. As the procedure 

 is the same in both cases, we will consider only the first 



When a tree is decapitated, new shoots generally spring up at 

 various points along the whole length of the stem, but they are 

 most numerous and strongest near the extremity of the stump. 

 In forming a pollard, these branches alone should be preserved, 

 the rest being broken or pruned off. The height at which the tree 

 should be headed down will depend on the object of the pollarding. 

 At the first exploitation the shoots are either cut away close to 

 the trunk or a foot or to away from it. The result of the 

 former method of exploitation, several times repeated, is the forma- 

 tion of a thick knotty head at the extremity of the trunk, rich 

 in dormant buds (Fig. 123). In the latter method, the new shoots 

 come up on these stumps of branches, and the succeeding exploita- 

 tions differ from the first in that the new shoots or cut off flush with 

 the parent branch and the pollard then assumes the appearance 

 shown in Fig. 124. This second method of pollarding is the better 



