Travel Notes From China
by James Lawrence
(Founder / Manager TGG)
In July 2004 my wife Noriko and I visited China to see my sister who lives in Shanghai. I also spent a few days in Henan Province with Prof Sun Zhiqiang of the Paulownia Research and Development Centre of China.
The space-age face of new Shanghai.
Shanghai is a vibrant boom town. Masses of new apartment buildings are being constructed in neat rows, simultaneously, to accommodate the many thousands of people streaming in from the countryside. It almost goes without saying that not all in Shanghai are sharing the prosperity, but this city is the real powerhouse of China's increasingly market driven economy. Henan Province, contrastingly, is quite poor. It is the second most populous province of China, with many of it's close to 90 million residents scratching a living off the land, although it is also becoming a manufacturing hub with offshore companies able to tap into a cheap labour source.
I found this surprisingly healthy Paulownia growing in a backstreet of Shanghai.
The first thing you notice about the way Paulownia are grown in Henan is the intensive management they receive. Each farming family in this region has only about 1/5 of a hectare (about 1/2 an acre) to work. So while it may appear in some areas that there is a Paulownia plantation of reasonable size, the fact is that it is actually divided up into many small portions of land, each of which has a family to look after it. You don't see much wasteland. Under the trees crops such as peanuts and vegetables are grown, and you see people working the land, collecting branches to feed to their goats tied up in the village, or wood for the fire. Needless to say, they prune the trees and ultimately fertilise and maintain them almost as a by-product of their other activities.
The Paulownia Research and Development Centre has created many strong clones of Paulownia over the years and conducted research into growing techniques such as pruning. However it seems not a lot has really changed in terms of the most common methods used to grow Paulownia in China. The first step is they plant root cuttings at close spacing and grow them for one season. The result is a field of 'poles' usually ranging between 3 to 5 metres tall. These are then dug and sold to the farmers at the local market who then plant them at their final spacing in time for the start of the next season. There are a couple of problems with this method. Firstly, root cuttings are a low-tech propagation method prone to failure and disease. Secondly, poles are problematic as when they are transplanted the wind often pushes them over before they can properly establish roots, so you see many plantations growing on an angle, and also they suffer from transplant shock which means they can not have branches removed during the establishment period which results in trees with poor form and too many low branches on the log.
I have great respect for the research efforts of the Chinese scientists so I explained to Prof Sun our recommended method of planting Headstarters™ at their final spacing and asked for his honest critical opinion. He actually said he agrees that it is a better method. So why do the Chinse persist with the pole method? I was told that basically, they lack the resources needed to produce more high-tech nursery stock (despite the fact that in research they have experience with the most modern techniques, they don't have the funding the extend it to a commercial or broad scale) but I also got the feeling that it's largely a case of 'that's just how we do it' and to educate and change the minds of the local growers is beyond the scope of the researchers. I believe there is much we can learn from the Chinese - Paulownia is, after all, a tree they have grown for thousands of years - but I also think it's fair to say our methodology has come a long way and from what I saw, we in Australia can produce trees are good as, and in some cases better than the Chinese plantations.
PRDC experimental plantation: the person in the background is cultivating peanuts
