Tree saplings question?

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So... I have a question about growing saplings... thanks for reading this and any interest.

If you were to compare trees and how to sprout them, are there certain temperature ranges that baby trees like to be around? Like, when I look at pictures of say Scotland or Iceland, they are ideal for growing trees. But just not for new baby trees, is my hypothesis. They have a lot of water in those places. But when you look at their land scapes its barren and stripped of trees. But they used to have trees everywhere in the medieval eras...

So this makes me think that maybe that the baby trees, saplings for the first couple years might have a harder time withlower temperatures? And maybe someone could fix those areas by doing indoor greenhouses, or heated greenhouses to help get the saplings started... then acclimate them to being outside and replant them...

Curious what you think about this. Thanks.
 
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Cold, long nights in winter and short summers are not conducive for growing trees. Add permafrost and frequent strong wind and you get meadows and dwarf shrubs.
 
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Baby trees in cold climates are susceptible to having their inner-most layer, the cambium layer which has to do with cell division and delivers nutrients and water to the whole tree, (think: your own blood stream) frozen in extreme cold. This is why very high mountains are treeless. So, planting small trees in fall in very cold areas will restrict the number of small trees that survive winter.

Out on their own in nature unless they are covered with an insulating layer of snow early in the season, seedling trees don't usually survive. This is why you can walk the woods up North, it doesn't become like a jungle because cold kills lots of small plants, trees and bushes that would crowd the understory in tropical areas.

This became evident to me as a kid in Massachusetts. I'd be out in the woods spring- fall and knew all the trees in the area. New saplings would come up every year and you would also see the previous year's saplings, which, by fall had grown to 3-4' ( depending on variety and growing condition) that a large number of them had succumbed to the freezes and, in years where we had ice storms you would see, from the weight of the ice that had formed on the branches, limbs torn from the trunk which exposed that cambium layer, that I mentioned previously, to the cold and once the cambium layer freezes, it kills the tree.

What we did was wait til early spring to plant small trees and then protect them the next few winters, until they had about a 2" across trunk width measured a foot off the ground. By the time they have gotten big enough and have a thick enough bark to insulate the cambium layer from extreme freezing, and the branches are large and strong enough to support the weight of an inch of ice, they will almost always go on to survive.
 
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In those areas treelessness is natural and due to weather, not deforestation. There may be plenty of water in the summer, but winter is just too cold and long. As the climate warms over the decades and centuries, trees will grow where the climate is better for them.
 

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