184 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
the ground as they could stand, the stems being so slender that 
they would not stand upright if grown singly. But on seeing the 
older sections where thinning operations had been carried out, one 
came to understand the utility of keeping the trees close; and on 
‘seeing the timber when ready for the final felling, it was a pleasure to 
look upon the fine, long, straight, clean stems, from which one could 
saw almost any class of scantling or boarding without being bothered 
with the dead knots, holes, and other blemishes so prevalent in our 
home-grown hardwoods. Under the German system of growing 
hardwood, there is very little chance of blemishes from decayed 
branches, as they all die off when quite small. The main idea is to 
get the trees up in height first, and then thin very gradually to 
allow them to increase in girth. This applies to all classes of 
timber, excepting that in pleasure-parks and places of public resort, 
where the trees are grown in open order, but such trees are not 
grown with a view to producing marketable timber. We have 
no doubt a German forester would regard many of our English 
woods to be very good specimens of public parks if intersected by 
walks and drives. 
The spruce is grown upon the shallower soils, where it pays 
better than either beech or oak as a crop. The spruce woods are 
raised by planting, and the system adopted is, we consider, a 
very expensive one. The old roots are all dug out, and sold 
for firewood at a loss of something like seven shillings per cord. 
This rooting may be necessary to prevent the increase of insects 
and fungi, but this we are inclined to doubt, because they do 
not take all the roots up, and we should think that fungi at 
least would live upon the smaller roots left in the ground, although 
the stem and larger roots were removed. The planting is, we 
consider, very much more expensive than our Scotch mode of notch- 
planting. For three-year-old plants small pits are made, and into 
each pit they often insert five plants together. This they call 
bunch-planting, and they will require some 20,000 plants to plant 
an acre instead of 5000 required by the Scotch system, and even 
after planting so many per acre, they have to make up blanks. 
Bunch-planting is useful where deer are numerous, as there is a 
chance of one or two trees in the bunch getting away, the damaged 
ones surrounding the good plants protecting them from the deer until 
they are strong enough to resist their attacks. We are surprised 
at the Germans allowing the deer to become so numerous as to 
cause the amount of damage we saw done in very many of their 
