132 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTUKAL SOCIETY. 



from seedlings, so that woods badly looked after become in time 

 filled up with young sycamores. Larch always seems to us 

 to grow well on the drier soils where ash is a natural tree, 

 and, although often planted with Scots pine, the heathy soil 

 which carries a good crop of Scots pine may be a poor soil 

 for larch. 



Trie natural classification of woods also raises another point. 

 Under certain conditions the oak or other tree may form 

 natural woodlands, but it does not follow that wherever a tree 

 occurs naturally, it always produces good timber. The following 

 experience illustrates this point. On a large Yorkshire estate, 

 ash is abundant in the oak-woods on soils rather poor in lime; 

 in another part of the same estate, ash is the only large tree 

 on the highly calcareous mountain limestone where oak is absent, 

 except on the river gravels : in both oak-woods and ash-woods 

 the ash grows to a good size, but when it comes on the market 

 the limestone ash always brings the better price. In this case, 

 the tree natural to the soil yields there the best timber. An 

 instance of the opposite kind was also seen in Yorkshire. On 

 the Permian limestones, ash seedlings grow up abundantly 

 wherever there is a break, but in spite of careful attention the 

 long, lanky saplings are not easy to rear into good timber trees ; 

 in this district, the deeper soils seem much better suited for 

 beech and larch. 



In the former part of this paper, considerable attention was 

 directed to the connection between the naturally dominant trees 

 on the one hand, and the undergrowth and ground-vegetation on 

 the other hand. This raises the question whether the ground- 

 vegetation is of any value to the forester, — does it tell anything 

 of the present condition of the wood, or would it help towards 

 deciding what trees are best to plant on any soil ? If this were 

 something entirely new in forestry, we should be chary in 

 discussing it. It is, however, not a new discovery, because next 

 to the condition of the trees themselves, the condition of the 

 undergrowth is the forester's usual method of estimating whether 

 a wood is flourishing or not. That the forester pays any attention 

 to the ground-vegetation is not very clear from writers on forestry, 

 and in recently scanning a number of papers it has been sur- 

 prising how few references there are to plants of the under- 

 growth, except as weeds to be removed or kept in check. 

 Out-of-doors with the forester himself, it is easy to see that he 



