THE LARCH AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN SWEDISH FOREST ECONOMY. LXV 
The more or less crooked stems of the larch-tree may be due either to 
heredity, if the descendant derives from specially crooked trees, or to direct 
injuries, where a race with small powers of resistance to the Climate is used. 
In attempts at acclimatization, especially in England, but also in Sweden, it 
has proved that some larch-plantations may suffer from frost, perhaps most 
from autumn frost. The trees continue to grow too late into the autumn, 
and the shoots do not attain lignification; and in consequence of this the 
top-shoot is lost and a bend appears when a branch takes the place of the 
old top-shoot. If this is often repeated, we get crooked trees in this way. 
Many Tyrolean larches have been exposed to this misfortune, whereas the Si- 
berian larch, which sheds its needles early, has concluded its process of lignifi- 
cation early and is in consequence in a high degree insensitive to frost. 
According to current statements (144, 577), the Scottish race of larches, 
at any rate in Scotland itself, sheds its needles before the Tyrolean larch, 
and is thus less liable to the bends that thus arise. The present writer, 
however, wishes to maintain that the crookedness of stem which often marks 
trees in certain larch-woods, is usually due to origin from similar trees. The 
writer considers that we here have a parallel to ÖPPERMANN'S » Vrange Boge». 
These are conceived as having been the remains of a form of tree which was 
very widely diffused in the open sparse forests of earlier times in Den- 
mark, but which is on the way towards disappearance since a good system 
of forest protection — the beech forest — has come to intrude on this space- 
exacting race.! 
In the Tyrol, perhaps, the opposite is the case. The consumption of larch- 
seed has been constantly on the increase, and larch-woods have been re- 
duced in many places. In order to obtain a sufficiency of seed it has been 
necessary to undertake collection further and further up the mountains, and 
consequently from more and more bunchy, big-branched and crooked indivi- 
duals. The larch-woods we afterwards raise from Tyrolean seed will, to a 
greater or less extent, be mixed with more or less crooked trees. This crooked- 
ness is certainly due not to any high degree to the situation of the wood; 
it can be explained solely as due to heredity. This idea is supported by 
the fact that one not infrequently comes across very crooked trees in the 
middle of the "wood amongst straight individuals, and even in the denser 
groups. Notes of this have been made from several sample plots (see pp. 
617—9621). 
Finally, the wind has been charged with deforming the appearance of the 
larch. As a matter of fact, however, the larch does not become more de- 
formed than the pine, for instance, provided that it belongs to a straight- 
growing race. This is shown by many observations and by Figs 36, 37, 38, 
49—51. 
From the investigations that have been carried out, the present writer wishes 
to draw the definite conclusion that, if the larch is to be raised in Sweden 
at all — and there are many reasons for so doing — great importance 
must be attached to deriving the seed from a suitable race. We must en- 
tirely bar seed from the Tyrol and try to procure it from Scotland and Si- 
! AA. OPPERMANN, Vrange Boge i det nordostlige Sjelland. (3»>Det Forstlige Forsogsva- 
sen i Danmark», Bd II, Kobenhavn 1908—11, pp. 29—256.) 
V.  Meddel. från Statens Skogsförsöksanstalt. 
