I certainly would not advice anyone to grow trees in their home because we know very well that these indoor environments are not adequate, at least for temperate trees, but I do not agree that it is not possible to do so in well controlled environments.
With the advanced technology we have today, It is certainly possible to successfully grow trees in an artificial environment. In fact, during my career, I have used several types of controlled environment cabinets for my research experiments for the control of certain plant diseases. The plants used had growth comparable, and sometimes even better, than what they looked like when planted in a outdoor environment.
Furthermore, the botanical gardens of most of our big cities of the world have many different species of plants that are grown very sucessfully in controlled environmental greenhouses for a very long time without problems.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Vance Wood
... We had this discussion about a year ago and one of the members made the observation that there was or is an arboretum in Canada that represents all growing climates including temperate rainforests such as the Pacific North West. The argument was that growing temperate trees could be done indoors if all the natural conditions were met. I visited the site and took careful note of all the pines and conifers in the exhibit. Most were obviously under stress and many were dieing. I did not see one that looked like it was happy.
NO.
|
When you go into a natural forest environment you will observe trees in all stages of health : some very vigorous, some less vigorous, others slowly dying and others dead. In the Montreal biosphere you will observe about this same type of phenomenom which also makes it much less artificial than having all perfectly healthy trees.
However, those of us who had the chance to visit the biosphere personnally, as I did, (not just only looking at the pictures shown on the web site) will also observe the presence of many very vigorous young trees which seem very happy in this well balanced artificial environment.
More so, since this biosphere was built only about 13 years ago, the first trees had to be transplanted as adult trees which are more vulnerable to the shock of transplantation than younger ones and would probably have behaved in the same manner as if they had been transplanted outside in a landscape environment.
For a person who has all the money needed to build one of those very expensive “walk-in” controlled environment cabinets, I would certainly advice him to try growing a bonsai tree in it. Probably, he could make a masterpiece (if he is a good artist) in even less time than he could by growing it outside at the ordinary growing conditions.