346 WOODLANDS IN SUSSEX AND KENT. [March 



Durin" the remainder of the liimdred years the vahie of the 

 underwood will be small, the trees for the ultimate crop of oak 

 timber standing 30 feet apart, and greatly checking the growth of 

 the underwood. The latter will pay nothing, in fact, during the 

 last forty years, and the wood will yield no revenue. The oaks will 

 then be felled at one hundred years' old, and in order that they may 

 yield as good a return as the underwood M^ould have done, they 

 should sell at £50 per acre, the rental of 10s. per annum accumu- 

 lated for forty years at 4 per cent, giving £oO. Mr. Clutton has 

 found, however, that good growing oak wood under these circum- 

 stances will be worth £60 per acre, giving lis. yearly rental, besides 

 something for thinnings. So that oak and underwood together 

 produce on the particular soils which Mr. Clutton has in view a 

 larger profit than oak alone. But the soil must be suitable, for Mr. 

 Clutton has himself shown elsewhere, that although the oak will 

 thrive on clay land, however stiff and poor it may be, it is a very 

 unprofitable tree on land which is unsuitable to it. 



In applying to particular cases the figures which have here been 

 offered, it should always be borne in mind that all depends on soil. 

 I have quoted a most competent authority on the profit of mixing 

 oak with underwood, but I have myself managed oak woods on 

 clays mixed with gravel, where the oaks ruined the underwood, and 

 themselves made little progress. Such land should be planted 

 with underwood alone, or with Corsican pine perhaps ; or silver fir, 

 if the subsoil be cool, or possibly with larch or elm, or Douglas and 

 spruce fir, certainly not with oak, which not only grows slowly on 

 clay-gravels, but becomes knotted, yields no big planks of what is 

 known as ship timber, and frequently produces what is called in 

 technical terms shaky timber, or that which consists of a bundle of 

 laths. The subject of the suitability of soils for different kinds of 

 timber and underwood demands the most careful attention of the 

 wood manager. How much it has been neglected we may often see 

 in stunted, moss-covered growths of larch standing on ground too 

 poor and dry for any fir but Scotch ; and in ill-advised mixtures of 

 timber, some sorts thriving, others miserable, all having been planted 

 together ; as if each species resembled another in habit, instead of 

 each owning a widely different character, a special liking for its own 

 particular soil and site, and a hatred of any others. 



Another reason which induces the skilled managers of Kent or 

 Sussex to plant their underwoods without timber, is that the former, 

 when grown on good land, will pay for a far more costly preparation 

 of the land than the latter. It pays to trench the ground for 

 chestnut underwood, because time is money, and the rapidity of 

 growth is very considerably increased by trenching for many years 



