Dave Fossett <reply@via.newsgroup> wrote:

> John W. wrote:
> 
> > What's interesting is that Japan's insistence on planting sugi over the
> > years without much focus on biodiversity.
> 
> Wasn't it planted for timber originally, and then just left to go wild when
> it became no longer profitable?

I've been told it's all GHQ's fault. The mountains around Japan's cities
were severely denuded of all timber by the end of the war, so GHQ
decreed they should be reforested with native trees as soon as possible.
Apparently, sugi seedlings are easy to propagate, but at that time
no-one realised that male seedlings tend to die out quickly under normal
forest cover, so there'd only be a few male sugi trees in a natural
forest. So they planted out all the seedlings they could grow, so that's
why there's so many male trees spreading their seed.

(But if that's so, why doesn't the gummint just order a cull of most of
the males?)

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                   Louise Bremner (log at gol dot com)
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