56 FORESTS, FOREST LANDS AND FOREST PRODUCTS. 



height during the first year, all the energy of the plant being 

 diverted to increasing the root and producing the great tuft of long 

 deep green leaves which spread out immediately below the bud and 

 make the plant resemble more a tuft of some marvelous kind of 

 grass than a young tree. Some of the lowest leaves usually die 

 during the first year; most of them remain on, however, for two 

 seasons. 



During the second and third years the growth of the stem in 

 height is slight, though it increases in thickness, but after that, at 

 least in a forest, its growth is wonderful. Frequently in a thick 

 wood where a young tree has been allowed to grow, in 8 or 9 years 

 after height-growth has begun, it will have reached a height of 18 

 or 20 feet and a diameter of no more than 3 or 4 inches, and will 

 have grown each year from only one bud, the terminal bud, at the 

 end of the woody axis, there being no branches, and no sign of 

 any having been formed. For leaves there will be only a single, 

 broom-like bunch terminating the slender stem. The rapidity with 

 which this stem is raised and the fewness of its branches until the 

 natural height of the tree is reached makes one of the fine quali- 

 ties of the timber. It gives long stocks which have no knots in 

 them, even small ones, to produce any ununiformity of quality, or 

 to make weak places on the interior of an apparently perfect piece 

 of timber. 



This feature which is the cause of so fine a quality of wood is a 

 great drawback to the development of the young trees. This single 

 terminal bud is a very large and complicated structure, and when 

 once destroyed in any way no other bud is usually formed by which 

 the growth of the young seedling can be continued. It is true of 

 most conifers (i. e., pines, firs, cypress and cedars) that they do not 

 readily form buds and that they rarely sprout from the stump and 

 are very difficult to reproduce from cuttings, etc., but with the long- 

 leaf pine such buds are formed and sprouts developed even more 

 rarely than with most other conifers. 



THE ENEMIES OF THE I^ONG-IvEAF PINE. 



The long-leaf pine has a severer struggle for existence than any 

 other of our forest trees for the reason that in all stages of its 



