Vol. LIX. No. 2619. 
NEW YOKE, APRIL 7, 1900. 
$1 PER YEAR. 
HOW PLANTS GROW. 
THE SAP IS THE TREE’S BLOOD. 
The Top and the Root. 
A USEFUL BOOK.—I have studied botany, and 
taught it in the public schools, and yet I never really 
knew “how plants grow,” until years afterwards, 
when I read Dr. Lindley’s Circle of Life, as quoted in 
Loudon’s Landscape Gardening, pages 379-381. I was 
in the nursery business at the time, and attended 
all the horticultural meetings in the Winter, to find 
out the best way to do things. But there was such a 
variety of opinions, all founded upon “experience,” 
that I always came away more confused than bene¬ 
fited. At a meeting in Rockford a nurseryman gave 
me this book, which he said was entirely useless to 
him, although it cost him $15. To me the book was 
invaluable, not so much for the instruction in land¬ 
scape gardening, but for 
the clear and charming 
manner in which Dr. Lind- 
ley explains all the de¬ 
tails of vegetable physi¬ 
ology in the circulation 
of sap. After that I knew 
just what to do in tree 
planting and tree culture 
without being told. 
SAP AND BLOOD — 
Having learned “how 
trees grow,” I didn’t care 
a rap for the “experi¬ 
ence” of any man who 
was ignorant of the cir¬ 
culation of sap. Who 
would trust a physician 
who had no clear under¬ 
standing of the circula¬ 
tion of blood; who did 
not see in his imagina¬ 
tion the lacteals gather¬ 
ing nourishment from 
the food and pouring it 
into the venous blood on 
its way to the heart and 
lungs, observe the chem¬ 
ical changes that take 
place when the air, which 
we inhale, comes in con¬ 
tact with the blood 
through the thin mem¬ 
brane of the air vesicles 
of the lungs, then follow 
it back to the heart and 
witness the vivifying ef¬ 
fect when the pure blood 
is distributed by the ar¬ 
teries and capillaries to build up all the tissues of the 
body? The structure of the tree is similar to that of 
our bodies. The lacteals that gather nourishment are 
the white hairlike appendages of the roots, the sap 
is the blood, the pores of the sap-wood are the veins 
which contain the impure blood on its way to the 
leaves, the leaves are the lungs, and if you hold a leaf 
before your eyes, you will see the air vesicles where 
the sap is purified by the air. Then it goes down be¬ 
tween the wood and the bark, and builds up a layer of 
wood and a layer of new bark all the way to the 
extremities of the roots, and pushes out new roots 
just as the crude or impure sap pushes out new leaves. 
There is the whole thing in a nutshell. If you want 
more roots, you must first have more leaves. You 
cannot make more sap by enriching the ground, un¬ 
less there are plenty of leaves to mature the sap, any 
more than you can feed vigor into a cow with diseased 
lungs, suffering their destruction by tuberculosis. 
THE BODY OF THE TREE—If the body of the 
tree is trimmed up, the sap will be used up before it 
reaches the ground, and the tree will be slender, for a 
stream that has no brooks flowing into it diminishes 
in size or dries up altogether. The heart wood is 
lifeless, and the sap-wood dies at the end of the sea¬ 
son, so if there is a spot where there is no new wood 
formed, it becomes a dead patch. This is usually on 
the south side of the tree, and is generally attributed 
to sunscald, but the sun never scalds a tree where 
there is a healthy circulation of sap under the bark. 
Neither is it due to borers, for the Flat-headed borer, 
which is found under the bark, lives on the tender 
dead wood of last year’s growth, and sometimes bur¬ 
rows in the heart wood, but does not eat green wood. 
In the Spring, when the tree is dormant, the pores 
of the sap-wood are stored from the ends of the roots 
to the topmost twigs with concentrated or thickened 
sap, the buds contain the folded leaves, ready for a 
new growth, and between the wood and bark is the 
substance designed for the new roots, and when the 
warm rains and sun start the tree into active life, the 
crude sap begins its upward flow, enters the buds and 
develops the first new leaves, where it is matured by 
the air and sunlight and passes through the leaf-stem 
to the space between the wood and bark, and begins a 
deposit of new wood. In the mean time the matured 
sap stored under the bark has commenced its down¬ 
ward course to make the new roots, and the circula¬ 
tion which is thus begun, is continued through the 
season, unless it is checked by cutting the tops, or the 
roots are disturbed in cultivation. 
TREE PLANTING.—It is generally advised to 
shorten the top of the tree to correspond with the 
mutilated roots, and I used to practice it myself until 
I learned from Dr. Lindley how the tree begins its 
growth in the Spring. Now I can see that if we de¬ 
prive the tree of the buds which are already formed, 
we compel the crude sap to push out latent, or ad¬ 
ventitious buds, and thus retard the formation of new 
leaves, besides, as the new roots must be formed from 
the sap which is stored between the wood and bark, 
every branch that we cut away means a loss of ma¬ 
terial for me first roots. As to the inability of the 
shortened roo^s to supply sufficient sap to develop all 
of the buds, we should remember that the first leaves 
do not depend upon the sap which is gathered from 
the soil in me Spring, but are formed from the crude 
sap which is stored in the sap-wood, and the tree 
would put out its first leaves just the same if it were 
planted in clean sand or sawdust as root grafts are, 
and before the supply is exhausted the new roots 
which have already started will send up enough to 
sustain them in favorable circumstances. And even 
should some of the limbs die, it could not do any 
harm to the others. All 
the forest trees have been 
pruned by Nature in this 
way, and if we cut off a 
limb, perhaps we have 
removed the very one 
which would have grown. 
Another year we can 
prune at our pleasure, al¬ 
ways remembering that 
no limb which is capable 
of bearing leaves should 
be removed except from 
necessity. The limbs on 
the body may be headed 
in to keep them small 
until they are removed 
altogether to give a 
clean stem as high as it 
is desirable, and a strag¬ 
gling branch can J>e clip¬ 
ped back to preserve the 
symmetry, also a fork 
can be prevented by cut¬ 
ting back even a foot of 
one of the branches. But 
the habit of the tree to 
grow either upright or 
spreading should not be 
seriously interfered with. 
Every healthy tree 
that is in good condition 
at the time of planting 
ought to live, and if prop¬ 
erly planted, thrive al¬ 
most as well as though it 
had not been removed. It 
is not enough to dig a 
post hole and jam the 
roots of a tree into it, for even if it lives it will re¬ 
main stunted for years. I planted 960 street trees for 
a man, and warranted them to live a year, and only 
lost seven. The holes were dug on contract, two feet 
across and two feet deep; then I had a man cut under 
until the bottom was three feet across. I then filled 
in the soil until the tree was a little deeper in the 
ground than it stood in the nursery. After the roots 
were well covered, I got in and stamped the earth 
solid to the top of the ground, then raked it smooth 
and level. On my own grounds, I spade the ground 
all over, making a circle three feet across, after the 
weeds begin to start, then stamp it down and rake as 
before. This prevents the ground from drying up in 
the Summer, and the tree remains firm without stak¬ 
ing. <>• w * 
Illinois. 
R. N.-Y.—There is a wide difference between the 
excessive root and top pruning advocated by Mr. H. 
BATCHING UP THE OLD THINGS. THE FARMER S DREAM OF SPRING. Fig. 76 
