PT. lY. 



PRUNING AND THINNING. 



215 



sign. In England I once watched the bleeding of a 

 vine, which was trained to the top of a high garden 

 wall. The lowest wounds bled first, and it was about 

 a week before the bleeding reached the upper wounds. 

 By this time the lower wounds were ceasing to bleed. 

 The sap which ran was as clear as water, but a thick 

 sediment accrued over each wound, like soft-boiled 

 white of egg, and apparently this, stopped the bleed- 

 ing, as the gluten of our blood will in our wounds, if 

 it is not wiped off under the idea of staunching the 

 wound. The resinous sap of fir-trees, instead of run- 

 ning off, remains adhering in white drops or streams ; 

 by which, I think, the pruner is in general more 

 frightened than the tree is hurt. Supposing the branch 

 to have been de trop, it would have used, or rather 

 misused, every year a hundred times as much sap as 

 for once only the tree loses by bleeding. I object to 

 autumnal pruning, because the boughs are full of 

 elaborated sap due to the root. These observations 

 apply to pruning hardy forest-trees for wood^ not to 

 pruning for findt. 



The largest sound tree I have ever measured is Measure- 

 ' the grindstone oak ' in the Holt Forest.* It is thirty- SngevSy 



, of treea. 



five feet in girthing at tnree feet from the ground. It 

 is dead, and was apparently lately dead when I first 

 saw it, since the bark was still on it : I think it has 

 been originally a pollard {polled or headed) ; and the 



* Unhappily burnt by a thoughtless boy some 5th of Kovember, 

 since this was published in 1844. 



