The rubber tree book . temand left to develop into strong branches bearing good foliage,as they generally do. The best trees have well-developedlower boughs. It is a pity when a tree has to depend solelyupon a mass of high foliage as the principal means of manu-facture of its food supplies. The illustration given herewithshows a case of such an improper method of pruning. At one time what is called thumb-nail pruning wasrather popular among planters. This consisted in nipping offthe top-shoot of the young tree when it was about twelvemonths old. The effect of this was that young trees whichwer
The rubber tree book . temand left to develop into strong branches bearing good foliage,as they generally do. The best trees have well-developedlower boughs. It is a pity when a tree has to depend solelyupon a mass of high foliage as the principal means of manu-facture of its food supplies. The illustration given herewithshows a case of such an improper method of pruning. At one time what is called thumb-nail pruning wasrather popular among planters. This consisted in nipping offthe top-shoot of the young tree when it was about twelvemonths old. The effect of this was that young trees whichwere naturally inclined to grow tall and spindly greatly in-creased in girth and developed a heavy system of branches allround the stem. Unfortunately the too-frequent effect was that the slenderstems of the young trees were not able to support a heavydevelopment of branches. Very often, especially duringstrong winds, the stems of the young trees snapped across orthe trees were blown over. So much was this found to be the. Fig. 26.—Pruning a useful high Branch too close to Stem. PRUNING 103 case that the system fell into disfavour and has generally beenabandoned. A somewhat similar system, but delayed to a more ad-vanced age of the trees, has been tried on some estates. OnBlankahan Estate, Sumatra, belonging to the Langkat SumatraRubber Company, Ltd., there is an area where several hundredtall trees, two and a half years of age, were topped by sawingoff the upper portion of the stems about 15 feet from the ground.
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookidrubbertreebo, bookyear1913
