American Forestry 



VOL XX 



MARCH, 1914 



No. 3 



FORESTRY ON THE COUNTRY ESTATE 



III. FOREST OPERATIONS 



By Warren H. Miller 



L 



ET us assume that you have in pos- 

 session a large estate, have in- 

 j herited therewith considerable 

 woodlot property, and have de- 

 termined to make a real forest of this, 

 together with certain of your brambly 

 and hilly pasture which figures out best 

 as planted in pine and spruce forest. 



It is with the woodland that this 

 article will chiefly deal, for it will be 

 the sphere of your immediate forest 

 activities, w^hereas the planted pasture 

 had best be left with brush and grasses 

 surrounding the young trees for several 

 years to come, in order to protect them 

 from the bitter winds and frosts of a 

 bleak field in winter and the corre- 

 sponding droughts in summer. 



I am convinced that, for the con- 

 verted woodlot of either hardwood or 

 evergreen timber, the French system of 

 forestry will appeal to American prop- 

 erty owners rather than the character- 

 istic German planted forest. I have 

 studied forestry extensively in both 

 countries and know whereof I speak, 

 wherefore it is with conviction, based 

 on intimate studies of our American 

 conditions in surrounding forests, that 

 I feel that for American private parks 

 and wooded estates the French stand- 

 ard forest treatment will give the most 

 satisfactory results, more particularly 

 on the aesthetic side. For that reason 

 nearly all the illustrations of this article 

 are from representative French prac- 

 tice, in such famous forests as Com- 

 piegne, Belleme, Bercy, Eiire, Gilley, 

 etc. 



If you are going into it purely for 

 commercial ends, by all means raze 

 your fine stands of hardwoods and plant 



valuable white pines in orderly rows 

 for all the world like an Iowa cornfield — 

 you will come out ahead commercially, 

 in fifty years! But I assume that the 

 estate owner wants to enjoy his forest 

 now, is already well on in years, and 

 would like to start in at once to make 

 the wooded part of his place a pleasure 

 to roam in and yet profitable in that it 

 yearly more than pays for its upkeep in 

 cord wood, lumber and forest products. 

 And to this end a combination of the 

 French standard and selective forest 

 systems seems peculiarly adapted. 



The French standard forest provides 

 a regular yield per year of mature 

 timber, section by section; and a natural 

 reproduction of each section in pure 

 stands of trees at the end of its revolu- 

 tion, over the whole forest, one section 

 coming mature each year and being 

 self seeded before cutting. In the selec- 

 tion system, trees are taken out here 

 and there when ripe, depending on their 

 neighbors to replace the tree by natural 

 seeding. The standard system gives 

 the better yield at the least cost, and if 

 there are eighty sections in the forest 

 one ripe section is cut every year besides 

 seeding cuts and secondary cuts on the 

 adjacent sections. There is also a regu- 

 lar series of thinnings to attend to on 

 various sections, so that the life work of 

 a standard French forest is a very active 

 and profitable one. The system applies 

 directly to our own woodlands, because 

 we already have a stand of mature 

 timber, some of it too old, some in the 

 sapling state, but the majority of it 

 strong, vigorous trees of ten to fourteen 

 inch diameter, with a dense second 

 growth of saplings underneath. Our 



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