Deliberately wounding trees

[Pat Ferrett]

This method is common in hedge laying and as said in training fruit trees.

[sean freeman]

Its a fair question stumpgrinder...but think about plant physiology and architecture for a bit

 

Hopefully you might consider that to release 'dormant buds' you need to change some slightly more significant than rupturing a 10-15mm circumferential section of the bark and cambium.

 

The probable outcome of David's injuries on the beech will be that not all the cuts will result in new shoots.

 

We should all be well aware of the incredible capacity of trees (of all species) to respond rapidly to injuries and to minimise the subsequent impacts..both passive (mechanical) and active (biological) responses are at play in this injury scenario.

 

And again as we should all be well aware (since this is the basis on which the majority of us make a living in tree work!) the health, vigour and (I would argue) the consequences of age class have a massive bearing on what sort of response the 'victim' tree can muster.

 

Whilst I accept that commercial fruit tree farming makes use of some aspects of this technique...there are very very few fruit trees maintained in commercial production once they get into the latter period of their life span. Of course the cambium produces new cells every season so in a real sense meristimatic tissue is always young never veteran or ancient:sneaky2: but as I alluded to the cascading impact of characteristics we would describe as veteran and more so ancient I find hard to predict in terms of this injury scenario.

 

Brilliant thread David..thankyou:thumbup1:

[David Humphries]

Did it a couple of years a go on a Mullbury which had lost half it top and no limbs to prune back too. I use silky saw to put small cut where I wanted the limb to shoot and it did.

 

 

Any images, showing where the cut was made?

Time of year?

 

Cheers

 

 

 

Just an uneducated thought, surely if climbers were using spikes (as everyone used to in the past) this phenomena would have manifested itself by now?

 

 

We've spiked retained trees. These were young oaks being reduced/pollarded to halo around veteran over shadowed oaks. Mainly for the reason of creating decay/dysfunction but also to see if they would sprout. They didn't.

 

 

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[woody paul]

Any images, showing where the cut was made?

Time of year?

 

 

Sorry no pictures, from memory it was in full leaf, that's y the top split, the cuts where small just a couple of draw backs with silky.

[David Humphries]

Sorry no pictures, from memory it was in full leaf, that's y the top split, the cuts where small just a couple of draw backs with silky.

 

Thanks Paul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[agg221]

Hopefully you might consider that to release 'dormant buds' you need to change some slightly more significant than rupturing a 10-15mm circumferential section of the bark and cambium.

 

I'm not sure that you always do. So far as I can see, there are two possible sources of buds - you're either initiating growth from dormant buds which formed as the tree grew, or you're relying on the ability of callus tissue to form different structural elements - my understanding is that both of these are hormonally driven.

 

Woody species tend to show strong apical dominance, which is hormonally driven. If you disrupt the flow just above a bud, you get a concentration which can force the bud to break. When used on fruit trees this is typically on small shoots where you can see the buds. Working on the assumption that no new buds are formed on a stem after it has grown, you can reckon on a bud every, say 3-10cm vertically along a stem, with semi-random radial placement. If you then consider the same stem as a branch of say 30cm dia you are looking at very large surface area (up to 0.1m2) to try to guess where to hit to force the bud to break. This would be consistent with a low success rate from wounding. However, it would also suggest that horizontal cuts would have a greater success rate, since you would get better disruption to hormone flow. A wider cut would also be statistically more likely to hit the right spot.

 

Years ago I did my school work experience in the propagation department at East Malling - this was during the advent of micropropagation. The process can use any soft vegetative stem tissue (needs to be capable of callusing). You build up this horrible looking lump of callus - looks like a mini-tumor. You can then literally stick it in a blender if you want more bits, and can grow thousands of tiny blobs of tissue in a very short time, all sat on agar jelly. Once you have got them big enough, you change the hormonal environment and they start producing buds, then shoots, then roots, and you have a plant. This suggests that if the hormonal environment is right you can get growth from any point, irrespective of the presence of a latent bud. This may show less dependency on cut orientation, although there still may be some if you need a particular form of disruption. It should be possible to distinguish this though by statistical probability - more of the tree will be in the right position to promote callus tissue than the probability of hitting the right spot for a latent bud, so you should see a much higher success rate.

 

It will be interesting to see how it develops.

 

Whilst I accept that commercial fruit tree farming makes use of some aspects of this technique...there are very very few fruit trees maintained in commercial production once they get into the latter period of their life span. Of course the cambium produces new cells every season so in a real sense meristimatic tissue is always young never veteran or ancient:sneaky2: but as I alluded to the cascading impact of characteristics we would describe as veteran and more so ancient I find hard to predict in terms of this injury scenario.

 

Brilliant thread David..thankyou:thumbup1:

 

This is definitely true today, but it hasn't always been. Earlier practice was to use crab stock and grow big trees, which survived centuries and definitely became veteran, since the middle usually rotted out. There is therefore a reasonable amount of literature on the subject from this era - it's not very collated but, for example, there are some indicative points in Evelyn's Sylva (1669 first edition, much more comprehensive in the expanded third edition of 1679 which includes Pomona) and I recall there being something specifically on mulberries in Culture des Muriers (Nismes, 1763). There is also a bit in The Gardener's Assistant which dates from the 1880s and it became necessary again during WW2 as part of the dig for victory campaign - Raymond Bush wrote some guides which were collated in one volume.

 

For what it's worth, apples have a habit of spreading as a series of tiered branches as they grow. If they're not maintained the lower tiers tend to die off, leaving you with a tree on a stick. Because they pollard well the easiest thing to do is chop the top off at the desired height and form a new head, but you can force new growth using the axe technique. I've only done it to two trees, and it worked on one of about five or six cuts made.

 

Alec

[Le Sanglier]

Any images, showing where the cut was made?

Time of year?

 

Cheers

 

 

 

 

 

 

We've spiked retained trees. These were young oaks being reduced/pollarded to halo around veteran over shadowed oaks. Mainly for the reason of creating decay/dysfunction but also to see if they would sprout. They didn't.

 

 

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And how did the decay/dysfunction test go (out of curiosity)

[treeseer]

David, it seems the regrowth from ax wounds is near nodes; nothing random about it.

 

just scraping around these sites could also work. look for buds w hand lens first.

[David Humphries]

And how did the decay/dysfunction test go (out of curiosity)

 

Lots of Bjerkendera & Sterium if I recall, from dysfunctional strips of bark.

I don't think I have images.

It was a good while ago, perhaps 7/8 years.

 

 

 

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[David Humphries]

Just an uneducated thought, surely if climbers were using spikes (as everyone used to in the past) this phenomena would have manifested itself by now?

 

 

Unconnected to our trials at work, I randomly came upon these beech whilst walking the dog up in Suffolk this morning.

 

They've obvioulsy been spiked as they are being retained as habitat trees.

 

The spike wounds look to be 2 - 3 years old.

None appear to have created advantitious buds in the callous, where as the callous on the large prunning wounds have.

 

 

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