DISCUSSION ON PLANTING DISTANCES. 5 



inferior article, and that is perhaps one reason for the suggestion 

 of planting Douglas fir at a wider spacing. If we confine our- 

 selves to the question of planting distances, in the case of 

 spruce you can see plantations of spruce with a considerable 

 taper on them in this country, the trees retaining their branches 

 almost to the ground up to pit-wood size and beyond. You see 

 the same thing in a lesser degree in Scots pine woods, and if 

 you compare that class of young timber, pit-wood, with what 

 you can see in the natural forests of Sweden, and Norway, and 

 Russia, it is obvious that it cannot compete with the clean 

 material from these countries in the markets. British material 

 of this kind was saleable during the war, but that was 

 exceptional. There is a very interesting spruce plot in the 

 Forest of Dean planted 2 ft. 6 ins. by 2 ft. 6 ins. The plantation 

 is, I think, 12 years old now, and it is clean up to 6 or 8 feet. 

 The branches died while they were quite small. That little 

 plot of spruce is a very good object lesson of how to produce 

 clean material, but of course the expense of planting at that 

 distance now a days makes it practically prohibitive. But 

 Douglas fir is the more interesting problem, because from 

 observations that have been made the Douglas seems to be 

 a curious tree, owing to the fact that growth in plantations of 

 this species is very irregular ; in other words, you may have a 

 few trees showing three and four times the diameter of the other 

 trees in the plantation in a comparatively few years after it is 

 formed. There is a very interesting object lesson in Gloucester- 

 shire of this particular point, and in my view it may be 

 connected with the question of spacing. The plantation in 

 question occupies a little corner, and contains about 400 trees. 

 It was made in 1901-2, and last year there were three trees 

 in it which had a height of 58 to 60 feet, with a corresponding 

 girth. There were about five others which measured in height 

 somewhere about 45 feet, but the greater proportion of the trees 

 were very small. The growth, in other words, in that little 

 plot was extraordinarily irregular, and in examining a fair 

 number of young Douglas fir plantations in different parts 

 of the country, I have observed that this curious irregularity 

 in growth is often very marked. Of course it may be said 

 that it is possibly because the larger trees are in different soil, 

 and therefore develop much more rapidly than others. This 

 explanation does not satisfy me. In the tropics the first thing 



