What I need to know is how much "live" wood do I need to
leave
for safe fluid transport? I'd like the hollow to be as
thin-walled as possible.

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - Only to
the
white man was nature a wilderness -- Luther Standing Bear
(Ogallala Sioux Chief)

Jim:
I've got a quaking aspen that I'm doing the same thing with.
It's a tree that I
collected a couple of years ago and have in a wooden box. I did
a trunk chop, boxed
it up and let it go. On one side was a major root that I cut
back pretty hard, and
that side of the tree died. Not a crisis, since the root was
not supporting any
branches. The live growth is on the other side. This fall I
was poking at it and
saw that some of the wood under the bark was dead, so I started
removing the bark
until I got to the edge of live cambium, and found that a good
one half of the tree
had died, while the other half is doing fine.

There's more that is "living" than the cambium, though. A good
deal of the "wood" also transports fluids, so you can't cut from
the inside, out to the cambium.

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - Only to the
white man was nature a wilderness -- Luther Standing Bear
(Ogallala Sioux Chief)

************************************************** ******************************
++++Sponsored, in part, by Jarbas Godoy ++++
************************************************** ******************************
-- The IBC HOME PAGE & FAQ: http://www.internetbonsaiclub.org/ --
+++++ Questions? Help? e-mail +++++