We live on five acres surrounded by woods. We would like to see more redbuds and dogwoods in the woods and wonder what is the easiest way to get 2-3 or each to grow? We don't have a way to get water to them so whatever we do will just have to be left up to mother nature. Can we start these kinds of small trees with seeds planted in the forest or do we need cuttings or small seedlings? Any suggestions will be appreciated.
What I wonder is whether or not if you _weed_ your forest, the dogwoods and redbud would have a better chance of spreading on their own. I'm on a couple of wooded acres in West Virginia. Last spring I started systematically hand-pulling the worst invasives - garlic mustard and Japanese honeysuckle - out of the forest floor. I worked about 6-8 feet into the woods from every woods' edge. It seems to me that the cutleaf toothwort and other forest-floor native plants are showing stronger this year, although there's still a lot of honeysuckle, especially, to pull. So I wonder if relentlessly pursuing the major invasives would also give trees a better chance to germinate. Even the oaks, maybe, I don't know. (No doubt there a studies on this, I just haven't looked them up.) Of course right in the middle of everything is an 80-foot Norway maple, and that I can't hand-pull. But I can destroy its saplings.
You can join the National Arbor Day Foundation and get 10 free tree for $10.00. You can even choose to have oaks, flowering trees wildlife collection, etc. These are small bare root seedlings, but th price is right!
-- Newt
Rachel, I really like your ideas. The only caveat might be that certain invasives actually enjoy disturbed soil (English Ivy, for example) so removal of *other* invasives should reflect that. Toothwort is such a charming native plant!
honeysuckle -
relentlessly
Just a note - these are edge-of-the-woods plants. I'd say get 4 - 5 foot tall trees and plant along the edge of the woods. I actually have mine in full sun in my yard and they bloom like crazy every year.
Yes, it really is. It's just everywhere right now, including around and in and out of my patch of Virginia bluebells, which I reintroduced to a wettish part of the yard by the edge of the woods and now, in their fourth spring, they're really spreading. We also have a carpet of Claytonia virginica (Spring Beauty) across our yard.
There's no English Ivy in sight around here, just tons and tons of the honeysuckle. My biggest problem in pulling that up is coming in contact with that nice native vine, poison ivy, to which I'm quite allergic. Pulling the garlic mustard is easier, safer and quite rewarding; there are whole areas where I pulled it last year and no little florettes of it have appeared this spring.
What I wonder is whether or not if you _weed_ your forest, the dogwoods and redbud would have a better chance of spreading on their own. I'm on a couple of wooded acres in West Virginia. Last spring I started systematically hand-pulling the worst invasives - garlic mustard and Japanese honeysuckle - out of the forest floor. I worked about 6-8 feet into the woods from every woods' edge. It seems to me that the cutleaf toothwort and other forest-floor native plants are showing stronger this year, although there's still a lot of honeysuckle, especially, to pull. So I wonder if relentlessly pursuing the major invasives would also give trees a better chance to germinate. Even the oaks, maybe, I don't know. (No doubt there a studies on this, I just haven't looked them up.) Of course right in the middle of everything is an 80-foot Norway maple, and that I can't hand-pull. But I can destroy its saplings.
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