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As a good part of the root-system is destroyed when the tree is dug, so is the top reduced to insure something like a balance. Half or more of the top, on a three-year-old tree, is cut away, the long growths being shortened to perhaps three or four good buds.
The roots should be cut back to sound unsplintered wood, and very long roots may well be shortened. The reader is aware that roots have no regular order or arrangement as do the buds from which branches arise. It is not necessary to try to shape the root-system to any formal regularity.
That is, the completion of the work left undone in fall and the production of flowers must go on at the same time, and this is asking too much of the plant. It cannot produce fine, perfect flowers with a poorly-developed root-system to supply the strength and nutriment needed for such a task, therefore the plants are not in a condition to do themselves justice.
It is the Western standard of values, the Western way of looking at things, which is in question, and which I must now attempt to determine. That I should have to undertake this task is a proof of the complexity of education, of the bewildering tanglement of its root-system, of the depths to which some of its roots descend into the subsoil of human-life.
The great forest-tree has a shoot, which in the course perhaps of hundreds of years, has developed a wide-spreading system of trunk and branches, bearing on the ultimate twigs or branchlets innumerable leaves, while beneath the soil a widely-branching root-system covers an area of corresponding extent.
This gives the young wheat a chance to spread out, to send up from twenty to forty stout stems from the root-system of a single grain of seed. The growing stems become more sturdy, bear larger heads, heads with more and larger kernels, of heavier, brighter wheat. With this culture, the yield is increased one-third many times one-half and the quality wonderfully improved.