HEALTH OF TREES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 25, 31 January 1928, Page 6

HEALTH OF TREES.

The question of medical treatment of trees raised by the "Xew Zealand Sm.ll. holder" is controversial. Many experts credit vegetation generally with the power of selecting from the soil such substances as they are able to absorb with benefit and of rejecting poisonous or non-nourishing material. If plant roots absorb anything offered to them and take into their substance anything harmful already existing in the soil or placed there by cultivators, we have in this a possible explanation of sickness of both plants and animals. The mysterious diseases afflicting stock may be due to chemical manures (which at the best are unnatural pabulum) or to soil rendered poisonous by volcanic or other action or tie interaction of chemical substances taken up by grasses. Fruit may have its flavour entirely altered by the nature of the soil, and the fruit-poisoning cases noted may be the restilt of poisons absorbed from the soil and •wrongly attributed to the use of dangerous arsenical and other sprays. There is, I think, no donht that fruit affected by disease (such as the Codlin) produces unpleasant symptoms in man (especially in children), and. indeed, any loa of health by parasites or soil-poisoning mnit causo all fruit so spoiled to be unfit for food. The pumping action discovered to be at work in trees very probably draws up everything of a sufficiently fluid kind from the soil, hence the early death of pines and other naturally hardy wood-forming growth where the soil B not free from injurious matter. I doubt if a tree can prosper upon chemicals more easily than an animal, but yet. like an animal, it might be drugged. * ONCE A GROWER.