TEANSACTIONS 



OF THE 



EOYAL SCOTTISH AEBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



XX. The Condition of Forestry in Britain. By Professor Adam 

 ScHWAPPACH, Eberswalde, Germany. Translated by Fraser 

 Story, The Glen, Innerleithen. 



After an interval of six years, I again took the opportunity, 

 in September 1902, of visiting a number of Scotland's most famous 

 parks and woods. This I did at the invitation of the Board of 

 Agriculture in London. An official tour of the Committee on 

 Forestry in which I was able to take part, and the kindness of 

 several landed proprietors, made it possible for me to make a 

 further study of the condition of forestry in England and Scotland. 

 From the standpoint of landscape gardening and arboriculture, the 

 beautiful parks of Great Britain are unsurpassed in Europe. 

 Landowners in Britain have not only devoted every attention 

 to the arrangement and treatment of their grounds, but they have 

 for long taken advantage of their connections with foreign lands 

 to gather together, under glass and in the open, plants from every 

 part of the globe. Consequently the country is exceptionally 

 interesting to the dendrologist, and particularly Scotland, where 

 examples of exotic conifers may be seen of an age nowhere else to 

 be found in Europe. 



With the greatest delight I wandered again through the charming 

 grounds of Mr Steuart Fothringham at Murthly Castle, where 

 hundreds of Douglas firs, between fifty and sixty years of age, 

 show wonderfully fine growth. At Lyndoch, upon the estate of 

 the Earl of Mansfield, I had the pleasure of seeing Scotland's 

 oldest Douglas fir. It has a height of 95 feet at sixty-eight years 

 of age. A plantation of the. same species at Scone Palace, heavily 

 thinned prior to my first visit, has since developed with surprising 

 rapidity. The wood is about 8 acres in extent, and the trees are 

 now forty-eight years old. I found Tsuga mertensiana and Tsuga 

 Pattoniana in large numbers, and of most excellent growth at 



VOL. XVII. PART II. M 



