a greater supplr

6 ARTIALLY hidden on a country

F road in the heart of Califomia's redwood country, a laboratory and nursery complex deals daily with what at first sounds like science fiction.

Secret chemical formulas help old trees get younger; hundreds of thousands of trees grow from one small cutting; trees grow 80 feet tall in just six years.

But this isn't science fiction. It's very much science fact and it's helping to make material improvements in America's forests. Operated by Simpson Timber Co., the project's mission is to select the best the forest has to offer and replicate it through cloning to enhance the natural growth process. The trees are not altered genetically. Neither are the forests. What's going on is helping Mother Nature do her best. No Frankenstein-of-the-forest stuffhere.

Generally the process works like this: The best tree per one thousand acres is selected. This is usually a 4050 year old specimen, mature enough to have established the characteristics for which it is selected. Desirable characteristics include small branches, rapid height growth, thin bark and straight trunk. A cutting is taken from the donor tree. Sometimes this requires a marksman using a high powered rifle to shoot off an especially desirable upperbranch. This sample is taken to the tissue culture laboratory where a two year process of growing tiny plants called plantlets begins. In a totally sterile en- vironment worthy of a space shot, a team using medical instruments deftly cuts and replants the plantlets in separate containers as they grow. This process compresses the age of the cloned redwoods so that in a sense they become younger and grow more vigorously.

Each cutting from the forest can produce up to a million plantlets. These are not seedlings, but small plants that Simpson refen to as plantlets to diffetentiate them from seed grown trees. They are not merely alike; they are identical because each plantlet came from the same original cutting taken in the forest. Later, when they are planted in the forest, the only differences between trees will be due to varying soil, water and weather conditions.

As these plantlets grow in the lab, the severe trimming they continually receive causes erect shoots, like redwood stump sprouts, to appear. Known as hedges, these can continue to produce planting stock for about five years.

Cuttings 2- l/2" to 3" insizeare taken from the hedges during December to February and put into the same kind of small vial used to grow trees from seedlings. In about six to eight montbs, the cuttingshave grownenoughtobemoved to covered nursery sheds outside. Their survival rate is as good as orbetter than that of trees grown from seedlings.

Simpson officials point out that the entire tissue culture process is very delicate and technical, requiring precise use of plant hormones in the proper