174 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



delaying their removal until too late, have given to us in this 

 country some of the worst plantations in the world. 



A common result of these mistakes is the kind of plantation 

 which a distinguished French forester has called a salad — a 

 mixture of incongruous species, broad-leaved and coniferous, 

 struggling desperately for life, and succeeding only in injuring 

 one another. There is nothing to be done with such a 

 plantation, but to cut it down and begin over again, unless, 

 as may often happen, our intentions are anticipated by a gale 

 which blows the whole thing flat. It seems that the accepted 

 practice of some forty to sixty years ago was to plant altogether 

 too many nurse trees in mixed plantations, and too many 

 different kinds of trees. 



Brown, a forester whose work contains much of permanent 

 value, recommended the planting of larch and Scots pine as 

 nurses to hardwood plantations, in the proportion of twelve larch 

 and nine Scots pine to every three hardwoods.^ In the type of 

 plantation recommended by him every fourth row consists of 

 hardwoods (oak, ash, elm, and sycamore) alternating with Scots 

 pine ; the other three rows are larch and pine, two rows of larch 

 to one of pine. A great deal of care and attention must have 

 been required to give a plantation of this kind a chance of 

 realising the planter's intention of a crop of mixed hardwoods ; 

 the number of hardwoods is relatively so small that the loss 

 of a few in the early years would be very serious ; beating 

 up with small plants would be useless, and even if the expense 

 of using large plants were not a serious objection, there would 

 be little hope of their establishing themselves in such a heavy 

 crop of fast-growing conifers. No doubt the large number of 

 larch planted was intended to give early thinnings of some 

 value ; but when there are as many as four larch to each hard- 

 wood, the larch will rapidly occupy the available growing space, 

 and many of them will have to be cut out before they are of 

 any value, if the hardwoods are to be saved. Indeed, in 

 plantations made according to this prescription, the result most 

 likely to be attained is a mixture of larch and pine with a few 

 hardwoods, one that is common enough in our middle-aged 

 plantations, and that is open to the grave silvicultural objection 

 that it consists entirely of light-demanding trees. 



Nothing could illustrate better the advance of scientific 



^ The Forester^ by James Brown, 3rd edition, Edinburgh, i86x, page 443. 



