wrote:
Now I am referencing Burns & Honkala, Silvics of North America Volume
2, Hardwoods,
circa 1991 #654. On page 823 it states and I quote.

--- quoting in parts page 823 ---
Trees 20 years old produce viable seeds....

Despite its high seed viability, rock elm regenerates poorly....
persistence of dormant terminal buds...... Emergent seedlings rarely
develop more than a single pair of leaves during the first growing
season due to this dormancy.

However under field conditions with competition....averaged only 27 cm
(10.6 in) in height 5 years after planting and only 52 cm (20.4 in) 10
years after planting in northern Wisconsin.
--- end quoting ---

I was expecting a species that grows almost as fast as American elm. It
seems not unreasonable to expect all species of elm to grow about the
same rate. That the metabolism within a specific species should all be
about the same.

This is making me suspicious that most endangered species of trees are
slow growing. That if a tree species is slow growing then its chances
of going extinct are that much greater.

This is bad news to me for I probably will not see my rock elm develop
into a "stand of trees" before I die.

Let me quote some more from pages 823-824 from the Silvics book on
Hardwoods.

--- quoting 823-824 in part ---

Most elms are considered difficult to root by means of cuttings.
However, leaf-bud cuttings, consisting of leaf blade, axillary bud, and
a shield of stem tissue, treated with a growth hormone and held under
constant mist on a rooting medium of sand or mica, produced satisfactory
results for several species of elm including rock elm (5).
--- end quoting ---

Hopefully I found something new and good on cuttings. I found this year
in April that my tomatoes and cucumbers prefered my light lamp during
the night more so than the sunlight from the window as my indoor
greenhouse. So that the seedlings grew more in the direction of the
light lamps than the daytime sunlight.

So this gave me an idea to try on the Rock Elm. I do not have a mist
apparatus but I do have a light lamp for most of the nighttime.

And so far it is great. Normally the cuttings start wilting and droop
and then lose their leaves. But so far, because of the constant light
lamp at nighttime my Rock Elm cuttings are not drooping nor wilting.
Instead the leaves are firm and upright.

So maybe it is this special dosage of light lamp that will make the
difference as to success or failure of these cuttings. Perhaps the vigor
of the leaves will coax the stem to root.

I do not know if anyone has researched whether specific plants do better
under a light lamp rather than the sunlight. And whether the combination
of both sunlight in day and lightlamp during the night hours causes
vigorous growth.

I am hoping these lightlamps means the difference between success and
failure. It maybe like spruce in that the leaves take a long time to
drop. But I am encouraged by a telltale sign that some of the rock elm
leaves had begun to wilt sag and droop before I got home to place in the
soil pots but the lightlamp revived their vigor.

So maybe instead of mist, the lightlamp is the better catalyst to
regeneration.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies