Post 24830
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Another advantage possessed by broad-leaf trees lies in the rapid growth of their seedlings. Surface fires annihilate most tiny trees. Two-year-old chestnuts, maples, and, in fact, many of the broad-leaf youngsters, are three or more feet high, and are able to survive a severe fire; but two-year-old white pine, Engelmann spruce, or long-leaf pine are barely two inches high,–just fuzzy-topped matches stuck in the earth that perish in a flash from a single breath of flame.
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.