SOME NOTES ON GEKMAN FORESTRY 15 



German peasant cottage, which our architects are wont to smile at as a crude 

 but costly manifestation of peasant architecture, and a quaint instance of 

 waste of good lumber. If we were to set out to build such a house we would 

 floor it with 2x10 and 2x8 hemlock joist, frame it with 2x4 (sawed out of 

 2x12), stucco it, and then nail on outside a %" dressed imitation, "beam" of 

 expensive white pine so that it will not warp and expose the sham. The 

 German, on the contrary, takes his six-inch kiefer thinnings, for which we 

 would have no other market than cord wood, squares it four-sided to a 4x4 

 stick dressed on one side, and frames his cottage with this otherwise worthless 

 forest product. Who then has built the most logical house; who has wasted 

 the less of his forest growth, and who has put the least labor on his forest 

 product to make it commercially valuable; — the German who plants and 

 grows straight kiefer whose thinnings only require dressing, or the American 

 who cuts down a wild sixteen-inch hemlock to rip it up into 2x4 studs? 



The three, four, and five-inch thinnings are all used for cellulose. As I 

 passed section after section of thinned three-inch twenty-year growth and 

 noted the neat piles of three-foot sawed and barked poles, I thought that it 

 was thrifty of them to get off the bark for tanning, but it made rather ex- 

 pensive cord wood of it. But later the mystery was solved in the immense 

 cellulose works in south Germany, principally around Dresden and Pirna 

 where millions of feet of these same short cord-wood piles were in evidence, 

 representing a steady market for all the three, four and five-inch trees; with 

 even a lot of six-inch, showing over-demand. These had all been brought up 

 the Elbe by canal boats, from the kiefer forests neighboring the course of 

 the river until it empties into the sea at Hamburg. 



Much of the eight-inch goes to Westphalia for mine timbering, though 

 a lot of it is sawn up for door and sash trim, which is almost exclusively 

 of this wood. Around Duisburg, in the heart of the coal and iron districts 

 along the Rhine and the Ruhr, you will see great yards of short eight-inch 

 lengths of kiefer for mine tunnels, and much of it is sawn into short 2x8 slabs 

 for roofing and sheathing the mine shafts. The ten, twelve, and fourteen- 

 inch kiefer is sawn into board lumber, beams, and timbers. The bark is all 

 used for some purpose I could not discover in the limited time available, 

 possibly for tan. All the rough boards are shipped just as sawn without 

 attempting to square the edges. As nothing in Europe is wasted they 

 probably prefer to saw the tare and sell it on the spot for kindling in prefer- 

 ence to leaving it in the forest as waste. 



In noting the sylvicultural handling I was surprised at two things;— 

 the shortness of the revolution, and the close spacing of the initial planting. 

 I never saw a forest of kiefer set out over thirty inches to one metre apart, 

 and they are left on this spacing until about fifteen years old. They clear 

 themselves nicely at this spacing, and the first thinning gives you a great 

 quantity of straight three-inch poles about 20-ft. high. It takes about two- 

 thirds of the stand, leaving the balance on five foot centers, which are again 

 thinned to twelve foot centers fifteen years later. The entire revolution is 

 not over sixty years, by which time the entire stand is of dominant twelve- 

 inch and second-stage ten-inch trees, with here and there a more successful 



