THE KURHSTRY OF FRANCE 



497 



consideration is uniformity of age for 

 the trees on each canton. A lifty-year 

 American white oak is 12 to 13 inches 

 in diameter, and at 75 years it will reach 

 19-20 inches, giving lirst-class new lum- 

 ber. 1 laving divided your forest into 

 approximately equal areas as deter- 

 mined by the lay of water courses, 

 ra\ines, logging roads, etc., arrange 

 your thinning cuts and replantings so 

 as to give you an unbroken series of 

 ages year by year. If there are suf- 

 ficient seed trees year by year on the 

 spot, you can go direct to standard for- 

 est by making a seeding cut each year 

 on each successive canton, eking out 

 any bad spots with hand planting. 

 Doing one canton each year you will 

 have three cuts a year until the hfteenlh 

 year when your first thinning cuts begin. 

 Any American hardwood forest can be 

 thus converted into standard forest pro- 

 vided that enough seed trees are al- 

 ready on the sight. With conifers, I 

 would advise underplanting for white 

 pine or clear cut and replant with three- 

 year nursery transplants for Scotch and 

 Norway pine. 



The French have developed coppice 

 management to a science far in advance 



oi the other nations. In Italy, America 

 and other coppice countries, simple cop- 

 l)ice only is used, with no provision for 

 future regeneration, but in France the 

 predominating system, both in public 

 and private coppice, is "standard cop- 

 pice" with complete systems of "bali- 

 veaux," "modcnics" and "anciens," as 

 the seeding coppice trees are called. 



This ty])e of forest is based on the 

 principle that certain species of trees, 

 notably oak, chestnut, maple and ash 

 have the property of sprouting from 

 the stump, so that you have a forest of 

 straight vertical branches without any 

 trunks. As the root system is quite as 

 large as with standard trees it is nat- 

 ural that the yield in branch wood is 

 very large and sustained and the sprouts 

 are straight enough to be valuable com- 

 mercially. In twenty years a crop of 

 four-inch shoots twenty feet long, six 

 to ten to the stump, is available. All 

 the shoots but one are taken, and in 

 twenty years more a second crop has 

 grown from the same stump. The 

 sprout left from the first sprout is called 

 a baliveau and serves not only for a 

 future seed tree but for shade and pro- 

 tection to the young sprout. Left again 



REFORESTING MOUNTAIN SLOPES. 



Photo by U'anoi H. Miller. 



