6 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARHORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



a home-trained man has to do is to revise his notions of 

 spacing when forming plantations. In this country, although 

 a temperate one, Douglas grows much faster in youth than in 

 its own home. May it not prove necessary, therefore, to treat 

 it as one treats tropical species in their own home, and space 

 it wider at the start — say 7 feet? If you take only these two 

 species, spruce and Douglas fir (larch need not be considered 

 here), for the production in a short space of time of a large 

 amount of pit-wood and timber, which will compete favourably 

 with the material imported from abroad, there are two questions, 

 I think, bound up with this question of spacing. To get 

 spruce (or Scots pine) pit-wood clean I think you would have 

 to maintain close planting, unless you pruned very early ; 

 or, better still, formed the plantation by sowing. In Douglas 

 I believe wider spacing is indicated. The timber will not be 

 as clean perhaps, but it will be utilisable, and by the time the 

 crops mature, so far as can be foreseen, the world's demands 

 are likely to absorb all available supplies." 



Sir Hugh Shaw Stewart said : — " If anything I have written 

 has produced Mr Leven's notes it has had a useful result, but 

 I should like to point out that he did not recognise that what 

 I was writing about was entirely confined to the quicker-growing 

 conifers. I think he will agree that these new quicker-growing 

 conifers do grow if not twice as fast almost twice as fast as the 

 older conifers. I do not think that is an exaggerated statement. 

 Well, isn't it common-sense that what is dense for one kind that 

 grows at nearly 50 per cent, rate may be too dense for what grows 

 at nearly 100 per cent.? Mr Leven did not touch on that aspect 

 of the question, but as he has spoken generally of all kinds I would 

 like to say that the forestry department on all private estates 

 in the future will be understaffed, is understaffed now owing 

 to the great expense of operations. That increases not only 

 the difficulty and expense of putting in a great number of 

 plants where you might do with fewer, but it also will be a 

 very great difficulty when you come to thin. Now if you 

 have got many forestry estates throughout the country which 

 are understaffed, how are you going to deal with the problem of 

 thinning before these thinnings have got any marketable value ? 

 They will probably be entirely neglected. In that same 

 Bulletin that Mr Leven quoted from. Bulletin No. 3, there is 

 a sentence which states that the woods of Scotland and England 



