64 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS 



can be perpetuated for many succeeding crops of posts or polo, fuel, or 

 small timber without renewal from seeds, but the sprouting power dimin- 

 ishes gradually with age. 



To insure good sprout growth, the trees should be cut in winter or early 

 spring and should be cut low. The stump must lie as nearly level with the 

 forest floor as possible SO that it will be protected by a cover of leaves and 

 snow and so that the sprouts may early form their own root systems. If die 

 stump is a foot or more high, the cut surface should he oblique in order 

 to shed the rain. All of the sprouts except three or four of the stronger ones 

 should be removed at the close of the first season to give space and light for 

 those remaining. 



For hedges and windbreaks, Osage orange sprout trees are recom- 

 mended. For production of fence posts in sprout forest, chestnut, hardy 

 catalpa (Fig. 47), black locust (Fig .">:3i Russian mulberry and Osage 

 orange are valuable. If the purpose of a wood lot is the production of 

 posts, polo or tics, the sprout method is used even at the beginning; that 

 is, at the close of the second year after the seedlings are in their permanent 

 sites, they are cut hack to the ground, then at the end of the next year 

 all but one sprout is cut away; thus is gained a taller, straighter shaft than 

 the seedling would have given. During the succeeding years these shafts 

 are kept well pruned of low branches. 



TREE AND SHRUB TRANSPLANTING 



CHOOSE trees that are not too large and that are free from fun i 

 and insects. The various maples and the American elm trans- 

 plant easily and ma\ he eight to ten feet high: hut almost any 

 forest tree can he safely transplanted if only three or four feet in height. 

 Choose trees suitable to the given purpose as well as to the selected place. 



lawn, school grounds, roadside, windbreak, or denuded forest. Have in 

 mind, however, that any tree or set of trees may serve secondary purposes, 

 i. e. the trees of a windbreak may eventually produce good timber or tele- 

 graph poles; trees valuable for the roadside may also produce nuts o: 

 valuable tree seeds, or may have flowers that yield large amounts of honey. 



1 1 will pay to transplant wild seedlings to a nursery bed, strengthen them 

 there for one or more years, then transplant to a permanent site. They must 

 be transplanted as carefully as the older trees and must be shaded at first, as 

 are nursen -grown seedlings. 



It is thought that the transplanting of certain trees, especially of oaks 

 and conifers, is made more liable to failure by an interdependence that 



