JohnnyO, Bontanist At Large

[JohnnyO]

I'm a pretty decent do-it-yourself carpenter. Did 95% of the renovations in my house myself, so I work okay with wood.
Trees are made of wood, right?
A couple years ago I planted three dogwoods down my side yard (I live on a corner). The one dogwood wants to grow a lot taller than the other two and has too many branches on one side.
Today I trimmed them all a bit and got an idea. Remembering from my 8th grade science class about splicing trees....
I drilled a few small holes in the trunk in places I thought would be good spots for branches, peeled the bark off some of the trimmings, stuck them in the holes, and sealed it with plumber's putty.
Anybody think this will work, or does redneck engineering with power tools not work on living things?

 

[Will]

Interesting idea. Going from one tree to another you could make a jungle gym. Do three in a tripod and put a treehouse on top with an elevator up the middle of it.

A guy I know who is a botanist was giving me a tour of the woods yesterday and he told me that the way they farmed firewood in England for centuries was to plant a tree like a Silver Maple and when it got about 8" thick, cut it down and let all the shoots grow off of the stump. Cut those at 8" and let other shoots grow. You get like a single tree with 100 trunks in a big mass. He said that now that wood isn't harvested for fuel really, there are old forests made up of these trees. That's sort of human engineering I guess.

 

[n9emz]

You just never know. In March, gusts from a tornado ripped my beautiful Chinese Elm from its roots and slammed it horizontally onto the ground. In the process, it drove a 3" limb so deeply into the ground I couldn't pull it out so I left it until cleanup. Had the shovel and chainsaw ready to dig down and cut it off below ground level and discovered it had generated a couple of fledgling limbs.

If things go well, about 15 years after I'm dead it will have restored itself to its former magnificence. Then someone will have a nice anchor for another 75 Meter flat-top dipole.