80 TREATISE ON 



cutting off only the badly placed branches & saving all those that could be positioned in 

 an orderly fashion for training. There's a concern that removing a large number of them 

 may impair the roots of the young tree or make suckers & false wood branches appear, or 

 cause the small number of retained branches to become too vigorous. Any one of these 

 outcomes will require too great a cutback. As soon as branch a is identified as a sucker, I 

 pinch it off to five or six buds, so that as its sap becomes shared among several lateral 

 branches, it moderates. If it produces others of the same kind, I'll subsequently pinch 

 them off. I give the false wood branch b the same treatment, as well as the two branches 

 e, d that get too strong. On a trained tree, I'll nip off all of these branches, but a young 

 tree must be treated less severely. Shoots coming out of branch n o alert one to take care 

 that it doesn't draw off the main activity of the sap to the detriment of the other branches. 



IV th . YEAR. Third Pruning. In the middle of the following February, to prune this 

 tree (Fig. 5.) 1°, I cut off the sucker a & the false wood branch b. I dismember & trim 

 branch c down to the lowest & weakest of the three that it has produced. As a result of 

 this cutting back, the tree becomes a bit more uniform in its complementary parts. 2°. I 

 fill out n o with all of the small branches that it has, to draw off, or, as the gardeners say, 

 to "entertain" the sap & forestall the development of new sucker shoots or ones that are 

 too vigorous. Since branch/is unnaturally stronger than g, located at the end of the 

 previous pruning, I keep the latter & I prune it so that it will be fit to become a good 

 fruiting branch. I prune branch/as a wood branch, cutting it back to the lowest ones that 

 it has produced, always with a view to diminishing the strength of branch n o. 



