Vocational Forestry: Presenting a Course in Forestry for High School Students Receiving Vocational Training in Agriculture (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Vocational Forestry: Presenting a Course in Forestry for High School Students Receiving Vocational Training in Agriculture

In all the world of animate things, the largest and longest lived are the trees. Consider the giant Sequoia of the Pacific coast. Some of these trees attain a height of 300 feet and are to 4,0000years of age. While man is considered the lord of creation, his cellular achievements cannot compare with those of the trees for duration of life and for structural magnitude.

How do the trees attain their growth? The story begins in the Spring after trees have opened their buds and developed flowers. At times when trees are in full bloom and the wind is blowing, the atmosphere is hazy with tiny pollen grains released by tree flowers. The pollen is on its way to fertilize other tree flowers. Some species of trees have both male and female individuals while Others bear both male and female flowers and are self-fertile. Not only is pollen car ried by the wind, but by insects flying from bloom, to bloom in quest of nectar for making honey. The pollen adheres to the insects' legs and becomes detached to fertilize female flowers. As a result the tree is able to produce seed.

In the seed is an embryo, also called the seed germ. The embryo cells are capable of growth - that is, they have the wonderful ability of developing cells that will reproduce the kind of tree from which the seed came. Around the embryo is a layer of starchy material, and around the outer surface of all is a hard coat.

Tree seed differ widely in size, shape, and method of development. Some are large like the walnut, hickory nut, and acorn, fully or partly enclosed with hulls. Some have round bolls or burs like chestnuts, buckeyes, chinquapins, and beech. Others like the pine, yellow poplar, magnolia, and summae, have small seed grown in cone-like structures.. Still other trees develop seed in berries such as those which grow on the black cherry, haw, cedar, hackberry, dogwood, sassafras, and black gum. Exceeding the berry producers in fruity covering of their seeds are wild plums, crabapple, persimmon, mulberry, ossage orange, and others. Quite different still are the' trees having their seeds in pods, among which being the black locust, honey locust, red bud, and mimosa.

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