December, 1919 
49 
PRUNING YOUNG TREES 
By Training It in the Way It Should Go , the Small Tree Is Brought to 
the Most Productive Maturity. When to Prune and How to Go About It 
SHEBA CHILDS HARGREAVES 
T O plant a tree and tenderly care 
for it is one of the greatest 
pleasures in home building. The in¬ 
experienced gardener generally leaves 
the training of his trees to the pro¬ 
fessional, thinking that pruning is an 
intricate process which he cannot hope 
to master. As a result, many trees 
have fared rather badly, especially if 
two or three individuals took the 
work in hand in different seasons, for 
even among professional pruners ideas 
differ very radically. A tree that has 
had too many trainers is somewhat 
like a child who has fallen to the 
tender mercies of a number of over- 
zealous relatives, each with a per¬ 
fectly good but entirely different 
system of child training. 
The tree in its early stages 
resembles a child; it must be 
trained in the way it should go, 
and no two trees are alike, any 
more than two children are alike. 
The owner naturally sees the good 
points in his trees, and so he is, by 
the very nature of things, the 
logical one to do the pruning. He 
will train them as he does his 
children, along the line of their 
natural inclinations, seeking to 
intensify the good and curb the 
bad habits of growth. 
The owner of a few trees may 
care for them entirely himself, if 
he will learn the simple philo¬ 
sophy of pruning and study the 
trees upon which he is to work. 
Sifted down to basic principles 
and shorn of all technicalities, 
— 
The summer pruning of trained or espalier fruit trees is 
limited to removing foliage here and there so as to give the 
fruit more light 
{Left) A young peach tree about a year after planting, and 
in need of pruning. At the right, the same tree properly cut 
to three main branches 
allowing the weak wood in the center 
of the tree to die from lack of nourish¬ 
ment, the pruner removes all the 
excess growth, leaving just enough for 
the tree to bring to perfection. He also 
spaces the limbs properly, so that the 
tree will be able to weather storms 
and bear the weight of fruit with no 
ill effects. 
Nature’s object in producing fruit 
is to perpetuate the species, so wild 
fruit will show many seeds with very 
little pulp. Man’s object is exactly 
the reverse; he desires the fleshy pulp 
for food, so he deflects the energy 
away from the seed to the pulp, seek¬ 
ing to decrease the quantity and 
thereby improve the quality of 
the fruit. By pruning and various 
other scientific processes the 
horticulturist has brought our 
fruits to their present high state of 
perfection, simply anticipating 
evolution by thousands of years. 
This is really natural selection, or 
Darwinism, applied. 
It is a happy moment for the 
small orchardist or home gar¬ 
dener, who raises his fruit mainly 
for pleasure, when he brings home 
from the nursery the trees which 
are to provide him with fruit and 
grateful shade in future years. He 
feels in a measure the same re¬ 
sponsibility for them that a father 
feels for his children. 
Tree training should begin right 
here, before the tree is set in the 
ground. The site should first be 
(Continued on page 70) 
Two views of a young tree, the first showing it as 
received from the nursery, and the second with cross- 
lines to show where cuts are to be made 
there are just a few very simple rules to 
be mastered. There must always be a 
reason for each move, never a hap¬ 
hazard cutting away of limbs. 
In the wild state, nature makes pro¬ 
vision for the drastic pruning of the 
tree. Should the growth become too 
thick, the inner branches grow thin and 
weak from lack of nourishment, for air 
and sunshine are excluded from the 
center of the tree, and nature, caring 
nothing for the weak but being 
always on the side of the strong, simply 
throws the sap into the outer 
branches. So the center of the 
tree is kept open by the death 
of the inner limbs. If a limb 
is out of place and tends to 
destroy the balance of the tree, 
a severe storm breaks it off, 
and thus a tree in its natural 
environment keeps to a sym¬ 
metrical form best suited to 
the place in which it grows. 
Pruning is simply man’s anticipa¬ 
tion of the work of nature, for as the 
tree is grown under artificial conditions 
and with artificial aims, the growth 
must be wisely directed or nature will 
take a hand, often with results not 
desired by the gardener. Instead of 
The circle illustrates the arrangement of main branches 
as seen from above,, resulting in a balanced tree. 
Work for an “open center,” as at the right 
