Originally Posted by Rachel

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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.