326 Transactions. — Botany. 



shores of the Pelorus Sound was a regrowth. Though nothing 

 could have been more beautiful or more interesting to a 

 botanist than the tall evergreen trees, draped with climbing 

 plants and loaded with epiphytes, beneath whose shade 

 nikau palms, tree-ferns, and other tropical forms enjoyed an 

 almost continuous spring, commercially this regrowth was of 

 little value. Even on the level land it did not yield more 

 than 5,000 superficial feet of marketable timber per acre. 



Of all the marketable timber-trees the totara is the only 

 one that might be artificially produced on a large scale with- 

 out a great expenditure. From what naturally takes place it 

 seems only necessary, after the present crop of forest-trees- 

 has been felled and burned off, to sow the land broadcast with 

 totara and grass seeds, excluding cattle, but allowing sheep to 

 run over the ground in order to keep down other woody 

 plants. 



The totara forest might be reproduced by raising seedlings 

 in nurseries and transplanting ; but this would be a costly 

 process. In England it has been proved that transplanting 

 forest-trees shortens their existence. By sowing the land 

 with seeds the New Forest was created in the eleventh 

 century, and in the same way has been renewed ever since. 

 In a very interesting article, dated Lyndhurst, 1892, the- 

 writer, who had evidently much information at his command, 

 thus compares the effects of the two ways in which the 

 English forests have been artificially produced : " There has- 

 been a great dispute as to whether the grand forests which 

 have survived from the Middle Ages were sown or planted, 

 but it is now pretty well settled that every tree has grown 

 from seed in the place where it stands. There are, of course, 

 plenty of planted forests, or woodlands, in England, but not 

 ancient ones. The trees which William the Third planted 

 at Hampton Court, at Bushey, and at Kensington are an 

 example. They are now about two hundred years old, and 

 their days are already numbered. They all show signs of 

 age, and one by one they are dying. Planted trees, in fact, do- 

 not live more than about two hundred years, even when taken 

 the best care of, and many of them decay much earlier. 

 Trees grown from seed in the place where they stand, on the 

 other hand, are everlasting, and, under fair conditions, never 

 decay. The oaks, beeches, and birches which were sown in 

 the New Forest in the eleventh century are as vigorous now 

 as they were at a year old, and there is no reason why they 

 should not be as vigorous eight hundred years hence. There 

 are trees in the forest, indeed, which are much older than the 

 forest. I went a few days ago to see the Knightwood oak, in 

 a secluded part of the forest about three miles from here. It 

 is an enormous tree, one of the largest in England, with a 



