Where to plant trees

There are many different reasons why somebody would want to transplant a tree. Individual trees are often used to great effect in landscaped garden design and often these landscape designs require the strategic placement of specimen trees. These replacements of trees can be used to screen out something that you don't want to look at, and they can also be used to fill in the gap that has been left when a previous plant has needed to be removed. And there are also times when trees need to be transplanted in forestry operations. Irish forestry uses transplanted trees in order to establish new plantations, and it is these transplantations that I want to concentrate on in this article.

Forestry in Ireland relies on transplanted trees for establishing new plantations and maintaining those new plantations in the first couple of years. The maintenance aspect of tree transplantation usually occurs a year or so after the original planting was done. This maintenance is to replace any of the damaged or dead trees. But the biggest transplantations of all in commercial forestry are in forestry and establishment. Can you imagine the difficulty of trying to grow trees from scratch on a plot of land? Imagine having to sow each individual seed. The difficulty of all this lies in the fact that any maintenance work that needed to be carried out on the growing tree would in effect be multiplied many times.

Ground preparation for the arrival of the newly transplanted trees involves trying to make the environment as suitable as possible. In order to make sure that the new trees have a better chance of survival, the competing vegetation needs to be removed or hampered. All the vegetation around the new plants is going to be trying to compete with the tree for the available nutrients. This vegetation could also grow up around the tree and severely hamper the trees growth; in some cases the surrounding vegetation could even physically damage the tree.

There are also only certain times of the year that a tree should be planted. Most forestry planting operations are carried out during the winter months. This is because the trees have gone into their dormant state; they are no longer actively growing. Also, a tree should not be transplanted in frosty weather or at any time where the weather is unsuitable for the planting process to continue. Mostly, the preparations on the tree are going to be carried out before the tree even arrives on the site. The roots will have been prepared, and the young plants will be stored in bags which are conducive to their survival. Wire fencing will also be erected on the perimeter of the site in order to stop anyone wondering animals from damaging the trees. Often, a stile is built to provide maintenance crews to have Forest access.