Forestry for FarmersFernow, B. E. (Bernhard Eduard)
Science
Forestry for Farmers
Fernow, B. E. (Bernhard Eduard)
Agroforestry; Forests and forestry
During the season, through the activity of the cambial part of the
bundles, the same changes take place in the new shoot as did the
previous year in the young seedling, while at the same time the cambium
in the yearling part also actively subdivides, forming new wood and
bast cells, and thus a second ring, or rather cylinder, is formed. The
cambium of the young shoot is always a continuation of that of the ring
or cylinder formed the year before, and this cambium cylinder always
keeps moving outward, so that at the end of the season, when activity
ceases, it is always the last minute layer of cells on the outside of
the wood, between wood proper and bark. It is here, therefore, that
the life of the tree lies, and any injury to the cambium must interfere
with the growth and life of the tree.
[Illustration: Fig. 8.--Tree in and out of the forest. _D_, tree grown
in the open; _D´_, tree grown in the forest.]
The first wood cells which the cambium forms in the spring are usually
or always of a more open structure, thin-walled, and with a large
opening or "lumen," comparable to a blown-up paper bag; so large, in
fact, sometimes, is the "lumen" that the width of the cells can be
seen on a cross-section with the naked eye, as, for instance, in oak,
ash, elm, the so-called "pores" are this open wood formed in spring.
The cells, which are formed later in summer, have mostly thick walls,
are closely crowded and compressed, and show a very small opening or
"lumen," being comparable, perhaps, to a very thick wooden box. They
appear in the cross-section not only denser but of a deeper color, on
account of their crowded, compressed condition and thicker walls. Since
at the beginning of the next season again thin-walled cells with wide
openings or lumina are formed, this difference in the appearance of
"spring wood" and "summer wood" enables us to distinguish the layer of
wood formed each year. This "annual ring" is more conspicuous in Some
kinds than in others. In the so-called "ring porous" woods, like oak,
ash, elm, the rings are easily distinguished by the open spring wood;
in the conifers, especially pines, by the dark-colored summer wood;
while in maple, birch, tulip, etc., only a thin line of flattened,
hence darker and regularly aligned, summer cells, often hardly
recognizable, distinguishes The rings from each other. Cutting through
a tree, therefore, we can not only ascertain its age by counting its
annual layers in the cross-section, but also determine how much wood is
formed each year (fig. 10). We can, in fact, retrace the history of
its growth, the vicissitudes through which it has passed, by the record
preserved in its ring growth.
To ascertain the age of a tree correctly, however, we must cut so near
to the ground as to include the growth of the first year's little
plantlet; any section higher up shows as many years too few as it took
the tree to reach that height.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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