Plantations and Home JYurseries Competition, 1912. 223 



larch woods, but nowhere did we see foliage covei-ed with the 

 white, downy material that indicates a really bad attack of this 

 insect. The beech coccus, of which so much was heard two 

 or three years ago in connection with damage to trees on the 

 Chiltern hills, appears to be very scarce in Yorkshire, in fact 

 we did not notice it until the last wood that we examined, 

 namely, that near the town of Penistone, and there no 

 appreciable damage was being done. At Sledmere, in the Kirby 

 Hill Plantation, most of the Scots pines about five feet in 

 height were being badly defoliated by a pine saw fly 

 caterpillar, which we have since identified as Lophyrus rufus, 

 a near relative of the common L. pint. L. rufus in the 

 caterpillar stage is very like the common pine saw fly but 

 it does not throw itself so markedly into the characteristic 

 S-shaped attitude that the latter assumes on being disturbed. 

 Although L. ?-u/hs has not been vei'y often recorded in Britain, 

 it is probably not so rare as is imagined, and since our visit to 

 Yorkshire we have had specimens sent from the Crown Woods 

 of Delamere in Cheshire. If taken in time before they have 

 spread all over the tree, the caterpillars are not difficult to get 

 rid of by crushing with the hand, preferably protected by a 

 glove. Perhaps the most serious insect attack that we met 

 with was that due to the larch-shoot moth {Argyrestliia 

 laevigatella), whose caterpillar works between the bark and 

 the wood at the base of the previous year's shoots. In conse- 

 quence of its action the shoot generally dies, and it is not 

 infrequent to find that most of the lateral branches of larch 

 trees up to twenty years of age have been killed for 12 

 or 15 in. from the end, and are projecting bare and dead 

 from amongst the green foliage. Fortunately the insect 

 generally appears to avoid the leading shoot, but now and 

 again it also is attacked, when, of course, the damage done is 

 much more serious. The caterpillar of this insect is much 

 hunted for by tomtits, and possibly other birds, during winter, 

 and it will often be found that these have raised the bark and 

 extracted the insect beneath. It would probably pay well to 

 erect nesting boxes for tits in considerable numbers where 

 larch woods abound. 



As regards diseases, we found the common larch canker in 

 considerable abundance, and the fact that we did not see more 

 of it is probably due to the action of intelligent foresters in 

 making a point of clearing out diseased stems in the process 

 of thinning. As previously mentioned, the reputation of the 

 Japanese larch for immunity against this disease was fully 

 confirmed on our tour of inspection. Where a young wood 

 of pines had succeeded an old plantation, a tree here and 

 there had sometimes succumbed to the attack of Trametes 



