422 REPORT ON LARCH FORESTS. 



advantages of international commerce in many commodities, it 

 is to be feared that the importation of the seeds of plants that 

 are required to stand in exposed situations is neither to benefit our 

 forests nor our fields. Whatever may be the fate of annuals or 

 the crops of a season, that law in nature which I have experi- 

 enced to stamp its influence so deeply and legibly on the trees 

 ■of the forest, may be expected to be impressed, at least to some 

 extent, on the perennial and biennial plants of the field* Of 

 course it cannot be expected that plants, under the most skilful 

 precautions, will be exempt from frost or the casualties of seasons. 

 The hardiest indigenous plants are not always exempt from in- 

 jury; their recovery, however, is speedily effected by seasonable 

 weather. Late spring frosts are more fatal to the larch tree in 

 this country than any other casualty, and this usually falls with 

 remarkable uniformity about the second week in May. In nur- 

 sery gardens it is easily averted with respect to seedlings, by in- 

 serting twigs of evergreens or clippings of beech hedges with 

 the leaves on in the seedbeds ; and although these do not 

 exactly cover the plants, yet their shade is generally a suffi- 

 cient protection. 



In parts of Yorkshire, where late frosts are very common, 

 some of the landowners, who nurse their larches a year before 

 planting them into the forest, prefer to insert the young seed- 

 lings into the nursery lines as late as the month of April ; by 

 this means the newly transplanted plants are less vigorous during 

 the critical period, and by that means are uninjured. 



In the forest, however, no screen can be employed for its protec- 

 tion, though much may be done by precaution, in adapting the 

 tree for successfully withstanding the inclemency of a country 

 in which it is an exotic. 



On transporting the larch into the forest, it is not necessary 

 that I should say much. Various modes are usually adopted 

 throughout the country, dependent on the state of the ground, 

 and the description of the herbage that overspreads it, the 

 strength of which also regulates the size of the plants to be 

 employed. In Scotland I never saw any necessity for planting 

 larch above the age of four years — that is, two years seedling, 

 two years transplanted, and that only when furze or other herb- 



in England informed me, that even in his grounds in Derbyshire, where the 

 two-year old seedling plants of both sorts stand in the same lot, after an ordinary 

 winter, those from foreign seed are brown and withered by frost, while, to use 

 his own words, " those from seeds from the Highlands of Scotland are as green 

 as a leek." I know this is the case in cold exposures, and that it accords with 

 the experience of many cultivators throughout Britain. 



* " The unfortunate circumstance which attends clover is its being extremely 

 apt to fail in districts where it has been long a common 'article of cultivation. 

 The land, to use the farmer's term, becomes sick of it. After harvest he has a 

 fine plant, but by March or April half or perhaps more of it is dead." — Fanner's 

 Calendar, p. 155. 



