THINNING AND PRUNING. 23 
never sufficient to form a shapely tree, is left alone. The same 
thing takes place in beech groves. Ten or twenty times as 
many plants spring up as can be sustained. ‘They go on 
together vegetating, but hardly growing. I know several in- 
stances of beech woods, which have made no perceptible pro- 
eress for twenty years. These are the most striking cases; 
but forests of other trees are almost constantly, if left to them- 
selves, affected in a similar manner. 
The remedy is obvious. Every year, from the first, they 
need to be thinned. For the first few years, the plants removed 
are of no value except for transplantation or fuel. Afterwards, 
they are of use, in innumerable ways; the young cedars, larches, 
and chestnuts, for stakes and poles; hickories for walking-sticks ; 
oaks and ashes for basket-work; lever-wood and hoop-ash for 
whip-stocks and levers; all of the five latter for hoops. The 
products of the thinning will thus obviously far more than re- 
pay the labor, even if this were not necessary for the welfare of 
the remaining trees. 
THINNING AND PRUNING. 
The principle on which pruning and thinning should be con- 
ducted, is a very plain and intelligible one. It 1s, that every 
tree and every branch should be allowed to have an ample sup- 
ply of air and light. When, therefore, two trees are so near, 
that their branches extensively intermingle, one should be re- 
moved; and, generally, it should be that one which is much 
taller or shorter than the neighboring trees. 
In pruning, that branch should be shortened which encroaches 
on other branches of 1ts own or another tree. It should not be 
cut off close to the stem, as, in that case, the wound will be long 
in healing, and the root* which supplied the branch, bemg left 
-useless, will wholly or partly perish, and, by its decay, will 
* «Tt is almost universally found, that a large branch corresponds to a large root, 
and the reverse ; and this is true, whether the root, placed in favorable circum- 
stances, determines the growth of the branch above it, or the branch, propitiously 
situated, causes the growth of its corresponding root.” —De Candolle, Organographie 
Vegetale, Tom. I., p. 162. 
