THINNING. 
Thin often so as to let the trees selected for standards ever 
have room to grow quite rapidly. Too much sunshine and 
wind must not be let in upon and among the trees at any one 
time by excessive thinning. Be careful to take off but few live 
limbs at any one pruning. Except for the expense I would cut 
off the live limbs at some distance from the body of the pine, 
and the next year prune these stubs off close to the tree. This 
prevents all danger of a little collection of turpentine or ‘* pitch ” 
at the point where the limb is severed from the tree. It is very 
important to have your young trees so thick that you will have 
no large low limbs. In this case the limbs will generally die as 
rapidly as it will be best to prune. I would not object toa 
rule which should read like this, viz.: Have your young trees 
stand so close together that the lower limbs will die as fast as 
the trees will need pruning, so as to have to prune off only 
dead limbs. 
I am aware that some people believe that pruning trees pro- 
motes rot, and some millmen have objected to buying trees 
which had been pruned. My father when I was a boy pruned 
half or more of the live limbs at one time, from a pasture pine, 
which had been ‘*‘ slivered” in several places. The tree grew 
well and its body for some twenty or more feet up to the limbs, 
became some two feet in diameter and very handsome. A 
few years since its top showed signs of decreasing vitality, and 
upon cutting the tree it was found very rotten with the red rot. 
That prince of New Hampshire foresters, Joseph Barnard, 
Esq., reports a case where very considerable rot was reported 
to be found among trees which had been pruned. A news- 
paper writer some years since, stated that carpenters some- 
times caused timber to rot by sawing it with saws with which 
they had sawed rotten timber; the germ or the microbe causing 
the decay being conveyed by the saw to the sound timber. Can 
this ever be the case in pruning? A member of the noted 
lumber company at Lisbon, told me that they found the lumber 
from trees which had been pruned sound. Many of my pruned 
trees have been cut and all found sound, and as I stated in the 
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