190 



PRUNING AND THINNING. 



PT. IV. 



dead and the dying are cut or left standing. The 

 absence of the dead and' the dying is of the greatest 

 importance to the Kving. The space occupied by dead 

 heads should be occupied by living limbs ; and at- 

 tenuated, dying, 2vaving plants, from their locomotive 

 power in wind, ivhip and denude their neighbours 

 more than stouter plants can. 



Exposure is no excuse for not thinning plantations. 

 There is no reason, because the heads of trees are ex- 

 posed to wind, that their roots sliould be exposed to 

 robbery from their neighbours and starved by their 

 own want of head, resulting from the whipping of 

 their neighbours. The best plants, being the tallest, 

 have always borne the exposure. You do not expose 

 them by cutting out the worst plants from below 

 them ; but you relieve them from what denudes their 

 sides and robs their roots. If this operation is trusted 

 to a workman, he takes the best plants to sell, and 

 leaves the weak ones to grow. These weak ones have 

 always been overshadowed and so made tender, and 

 when the large ones are withdrawn from above them, 

 if they do not die, they do not grow, but remain 

 hideous scarecrows ; then thinning gets a bad name, — 

 ' the plantation has been spoilt by letting the wind in' 



Thinning and pruning should work together, and 

 both should be gradual and annual. By rearing timber 

 moderately close from the beginning, increasing the 

 distance of the trees directly as their size, and thus 

 depriving the sides and the lower parts of the stems of 



