Don’t Butcher Your Trees.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 11, 17 March 1909, Page 40

Don’t Butcher Your Trees.

These photographs are presented to enforce the admonition. Don’t. Butcher \onr Trees! It might well hr extended thus: In Case of Doubt, Don’t Trim!

There is a prevalent idea that shade trees need trimming. It is a wrong idea, based. probably, on the fact that certain fruit trees bear better if judiciously ami skilfully trimmed. Fruit trees, in the modern sense, are purely artificial in

their production, and the trimming is a part of the diversion of energy from nature’s plan of fruit merely to carry seed, to man’s plan of fruit for food. In the case of shade trees, no such diversion is necessary or desirable. We

value the elm for its vase form, the maples for their rounded form. Trimming interferes with natural form, and. for that reason alone, it should not be practised, save in rare cases, and then under expert handling. To have natur-

ally beautiful trees, each kind of its own beauty, allow nature to make those trees in her own way. Tt is more than foolish —it is wicked, to allow an ignorant wood-butcher to say what the form of God’s trees shall be.

But there is more reason for opposing trimming. See the tree shown in the upper left corner; it has been entirely ruined by brutal chopping. Nature tries to heal the wounds and repair the damage by sending out numerous shoots. The

junction of these with the stem is a fertile breeding-place for fungoid diseases and for insects to prey on the weakened tree. The trees, on the upper right, have been repeatedly thus mutilated, so that no suggestion of their natural form re-

mains, and their life is shortened by more than half. To have natural and beautiful trees, don’t trim! To have line avenues, don’t trim! When in doubt, don’t trim!—Bv j. Horace McFarland.