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We live on five acres surrounded by woods. We would like to see more
redbuds and dogwoods in the woods and wonder what is the easiest way
to get 2-3 or each to grow? We don't have a way to get water to them
so whatever we do will just have to be left up to mother nature. Can
we start these kinds of small trees with seeds planted in the forest
or do we need cuttings or small seedlings? Any suggestions will be
appreciated.

What I wonder is whether or not if you _weed_ your forest, the dogwoods and
redbud would have a better chance of spreading on their own. I'm on a couple
of wooded acres in West Virginia. Last spring I started systematically
hand-pulling the worst invasives - garlic mustard and Japanese honeysuckle -
out of the forest floor. I worked about 6-8 feet into the woods from every
woods' edge. It seems to me that the cutleaf toothwort and other
forest-floor native plants are showing stronger this year, although there's
still a lot of honeysuckle, especially, to pull. So I wonder if relentlessly
pursuing the major invasives would also give trees a better chance to
germinate. Even the oaks, maybe, I don't know. (No doubt there a studies on
this, I just haven't looked them up.) Of course right in the middle of
everything is an 80-foot Norway maple, and that I can't hand-pull. But I can
destroy its saplings.