Post 24034
Created:
Modified:
The ability to send up sprouts, which most deciduous trees possess, is also a very great advantage in the fight against fire. A fire may destroy a deciduous forest and all its seeds without injuring the potent roots beneath the surface. The year following the fire, most of these roots send up sprouts that swiftly grow to replace the fallen forest. Among the so-called Pine Family, the ability to send up sprouts or shoots is limited to a few kinds, most prominent of which is the redwood.
Repeated forest fires have injured enormously the Southern hardwood forests; they have damaged millions of trees so that they have become hollow or punky-hearted. These fires have burned off limbs or burned into the trunks or the roots and made openings through which many kinds of fungi have entered the hearts of the trees, to doom them to rot and decay.
Forest fires have been common through the ages. Charcoal has been found in fossil. This has a possible age of a million years. Charred logs have been found, in Dakota and elsewhere, several hundred feet beneath the surface. The big trees of California have fire scars that are two thousand years old.