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Comment by kelchm | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal, but I had around 40 trees harvested from my property last year as part of a larger forestry job on an adjacent property. These were mostly mature Poplar along with a few middle aged Black Walnut.

At one point I asked the forester what I could do to help promote healthy regrowth of the forest. His response was that I didn’t need to do anything and that “the best way to grow a new tree [in a forest] is to cut an old one down”. This honestly seemed a bit like nonsense to me at the time, but watching the way things have already started to rebound has been pretty incredible.

I started counting new seedlings this summer but ended up giving up after I had counted more than 200 poplar seedlings within a relatively small area. Obviously all of those won’t survive to maturity, but it’s given me a new appreciation for just how effective forests are at regenerating themselves when harvesting is done responsibly.

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Conifer trees take a lot longer to establish naturally. It often takes a cycle of aspen or poplar trees, followed by a fire, for conifers to start growing and thriving. I don't know how long that typically takes, but I think it could easily be a human lifetime.

Planting conifer seedlings can result in a young forest in as little as 20 years. Typically this is done to ensure a future harvest for the softwood lumber industry. Logging enterprises are the primary planters of trees in British Columbia, as they are required by law to reforest land that has been deforested.

The trees that are planted are typically some mixture of pine and spruce in the interior dry regions, or a mixture of hemlock, spruce, and cedar in wet or coastal regions.

This results in a somewhat synthetic forest that isn't really like a natural forest, but grows quickly. The trees that I planted when I was 23 are likely over 4 meters tall now.

Source: I worked as a tree planter for 3 seasons, grew up in a pulp & paper town, have known a lot of forestry people.

I think Poplar and Aspen are particularly notorious for this. I just had to cut down a 50 foot Aspen in a small-ish backyard because it had started rotting and was becoming unsafe. No one warned us what was going to happen next. Within the next few months at least 50 suckers have popped up in our yard and -- worse -- our unsuspecting neighbor. As much as we loved the tree and were sad to see it go, this feels like an invasion.

Aspens (for the uninitiated) are rhizomes. Some of the largest aspen groves - all of the same single plant, are > 100 acres in size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

> Aspens (for the uninitiated) are rhizomes.

I think I can safely speak for most of the uninitiated when I say that this sentence is completely meaningless to us.

Thankfully, that Wikipedia link can help y'all out

Do you have deer? In my parents yard when trees drop there is a huge competetion to grow up in the clearing. but the deer swoop in and the maples and oaks don’t have a chance. The pines and holly trees take off.

12000 years ago that land was bare mud and rock devoid of topsoil. Huge tracts of today's forests stand on what was stripped, clearcut land 100 years ago when wood was a primary heating fuel.

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