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CHAP. 39. (26.)—TREATMENT OF THE DISEASES OF TREES.

Having set forth the various maladies by which trees are attacked, it seems only proper to mention the most appropriate remedies as well. Some of these remedies may be applied to all kinds of trees in common, while others, again, are peculiar to some only. The methods that are common to them all, are, baring the roots, or moulding them up, thus admitting the air or keeping it away, as the case may be; giving them water, or depriving them of it, refreshing them with the nutritious juices of manure, and lightening them of their burdens by pruning. The operation, too, of bleeding,1 as it were, is performed upon them by withdrawing their juices, and the bark is scraped all round2 to improve them. In the vine, the stock branches are sometimes lengthened out, and at other times repressed; the buds too are smoothed, and in a measure polished up, in case the cold weather has made them rough and scaly. These remedies are better suited to some kinds of trees and less so to others: thus the cypress, for instance, has a dislike to water, and manifests an aversion to manure, spading round it, pruning, and, indeed, remedial operations of every kind; nay, what is more, it is killed by irrigation, while, on the other hand, the vine and the pomegranate receive their principal nutriment from it. In the fig, again, the tree is nourished by watering, while the very same thing will make the fruit pine and die: the almond, too, if the ground is spaded about it, will lose its blossom. In the same way, too, there must be no digging about the roots of trees when newly grafted, or indeed until such time as they are sufficiently strong to bear. Many trees require that all superfluous burdens should be pruned away from them, just as we ourselves cut the nails and hair. Old trees are often cut down to the ground, and then shoot up again from one of the suckers; this, however, is not the case with all of them, but only those, the nature of which, as we have already stated,3 will admit of it.

1 See c. 43 of this Book.

2 See c. 45 of this Book.

3 In B. xvi. cc. 53, 56, 66, 67, and 90.

The Natural History. Pliny the Elder. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855.

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