6o 



IRISH c;ardening 



The Development 

 Forestry 



.f Rritisl 



MAW of the ie;uli.-i>> o( Ikisii I.akdkni m. know 

 Mr. Forbes -till' hf.id ol' llu* Irish Forest 

 Service— ami will iherelore re;iJ, with adileil 

 interest, this his recent book. * 



The name is, perhaps, a lillli- misle.uiiii.i;. One 

 mi^lit be led to suppose that it was a description o( the 

 m^radiial inception and orkjanisalion and development 

 and iinprovenjent and perfecting of our British forestry 

 svsteni out of liie oriifinal chaos in which it ctuelly 

 weltered. Mi. Forbes describes, in a veiy interestinj; 

 tirst chapter, the original chaos, but we look in vain 

 for any account of the ultimate perfected development, 

 and possibly tiie reason for tiiis is that it has not 

 occurred yet. Mr. Forbes describes how the first 

 dawnings of history discover all countries in the tem- 

 perate zones covered with far-reaching forests in which 

 the savage inhabitants hunted to secure themselves food, 

 and to which they fled e>i bloc in time of tribal danger. 

 In those far off times the forests were regarded with a 

 friendly eye, but as by degrees life and property became 

 more secure, people acquired fixed residences in groups 

 and villages, and began to depend on their flocks and 

 herds for sustenance and support instead of on their 

 bow and spear. Then, naturally, the forest began to be 

 looked upon as occupying land that would be more pro- 

 fitable as pasture, and, further, it harboured rogues and 

 outlaws. The respectable people now had houses of 

 their own, so that it was meritorious to clear it. Not 

 only so, but it is well known that excessive grazing of 

 cattle will ultimately obliterate whole forest tracts. 

 The seedling trees are eaten as fast as they grow. The 

 woods become more and more open through the decay 

 and fall of mature trees ; great gaps are opened by 

 wind, and turn into grass, and in time the forest is one 

 only in name. 



Then comes another swing of the pendulum. ,\ 

 rapidly growing rural population, with increasing needs 

 for timber for fuel and building, begin to realise the 

 value of the woods they have so ruthlessly destroyed. 

 Timber becomes a merchantable article and tracts of 

 timber sources of possible profit to be safeguarded and 

 utilised to the advantage of the owner. This would 

 bring us down to about the thirteenth century, and from 

 this date we find the first laws restricting grazing and 

 indiscriminate cutting. Still things, at any rate in the 

 British Isles, hardly mended until the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth centuries, when it began to be recognised 

 that the necessary supply of timber could only be secured 

 by fencing wooded areas against cattle and trespass, 

 and putting them under some system of management. 

 Hence our first sylvicultural efforts. At this time there 

 were large forest areas in the hands of the Crown, 

 but with the want of forethought so strikingly indi- 

 genous in England, these were almost all distributed 

 among private owners from the time of Henry \'ni. to 

 Charles H. The great church and monastic lands and 

 woods went too until a mere fragment was left in other 



* "The Developme 

 los. 6d. net. 



of British Forestry." London : .^rnold. Pr 



lli.iTi pii\ate hands. .\iul to quote the autiior's own 

 wonis " While this destructive process was going on 

 iu'ie till- more advanced nationalities abroad, such as 

 I'rance, Switzerland, the Cierman States, &c., were 

 inaugiH-ating a .system oi' scientific forestry whiih 

 gradually extended from the stale, church, and com- 

 munal forests to the private woods, and resulted in a 

 definite recognition oi' the fact that forests were the 

 heritage of the nation, producers of one of the chief 

 necessities of industrial development, and could not be 

 neglectetl or destroyed at the whim ov ple.isuie of the 

 iniliviilu.ils who happetu-il to possess lliem for llii' time 

 being." 



So far Mr. I'orbes brings us historically, and to our 

 liisappoinlincnl sti>ps. We should have liked to hear 

 from him of the great planting movement which took 

 place from 1750 to 1850, and during which, practical!) , 

 all our Irish demesnes were laid out and planted, and 

 some of our hill siiles — for instance, the slopes of the 

 Galtees in Tipperary were practically afforested. 

 Most of us know how again the pendulum swung with 



the Land Acts, and agitation and we are where we 



are. 



Mr. Forbes then goes into the problem of the world's 

 timber supply, and display's great knowledge of the 

 subject, and research, in his handling of it. His con- 

 clusions are more sanguine than those of most writers 

 on the subject, but still he admits that a heavy ri.se in 

 prices is probably inevitable, and he is emphatic that it 

 is of the utmost importance that Great Britain and 

 Ireland should produce as much as possible of the 

 immense quantities of timber they use. His difficulty, 

 however, is to secure lands upon which timber can be pro- 

 fitably grown, as he makes the rather sweeping assertion 

 that it is only upon agricultural land that first or second 

 class timber can be grown in Britain. This is surely 

 untenable, and he contradicts it himself later on (page 

 125). He is certainly right in eliminating from possible 

 planting grounds the deep red bogs, and everything 

 above the 1,000 feet line, except, perhaps, occasional 

 favoured spots, but there is a considerable margin 

 between the two. .\. K. Moer.an. 



( To he .ondiidcd.) 



Bees in Relation to Pollin.ation. 



That bees are really essential to the formation of 

 fruit is generalh- recognised, but at the same time there 

 are few recorded experiments that actually demonstrate 

 the fact. Mr. W. B. Little, the Horticultural Instructor 

 at the Armstrong College, Newcastle-on-Tyne, places 

 on record, in the March number of the "Journal of the 

 (English) Board of .Agriculture," a series of interesting 

 and conclusive experiments on this important subject. 

 He experimented upon apples, black and red currants, 

 and gooseberries. The method adopted was to 

 enclose either the whole plant in the case of bush 

 fruit or particular branches in the case of trees in 

 a protecting covering of wire netting and muslin 

 during the whole natural period of pollination. The 

 result in each case was that no fruit was produced, 

 but instead a luxuriant growth of shoots. Control 

 plants to which insects had free access abundance of 

 fruit was produced. 



