DISCUSSION ON PLANTING DISTANCES. 7 



are already in an unhealthy condition owing to the amount of 

 branches that have not been burned. If you are going to carry 

 on a system which will make it impossible to clear out the 

 thinnings that are not marketable, you are not going to do 

 anything to alleviate this unhealthy condition, and you may 

 increase it. That is a very important consideration. I am 

 not so foolish as to underrate anything that we have learned 

 from that great German school of forestry, but I would like 

 to suggest that the German system is not entirely a safe guide 

 for us. We have to leave thinnings in the woods, owing to 

 the impossibility of maintaining a sufficient staff in wood 

 management. In Germany the difficulty is to prevent them 

 being taken out of the wood. People come for them. Here 

 our difficulty is to get anybody at all to look at our branches 

 or litter suitable for firewood. If we burn them it is a very 

 expensive and a very slow process, and I do not see how we 

 are going to do that with any regularity in the future, with 

 our management understaffed. Therefore, I maintain we should 

 try and do with the minimum amount of plants and so have 

 fewer suppressed trees to deal with. I am not sure, speaking 

 on the general question of distance planting, that it is such 

 a very great revolution after all to suggest that we should 

 extend our distances, because the very woods that our Chairman 

 has alluded to as having been so useful in this war were, I 

 have heard it stated, planted 6 feet apart 150 years ago. 



The Chairman : " Larch." 



Sir Hugh Shaw Stewart: "Quite so. I have endeavoured 

 to take careful notes in Wiltshire and in Scotland on the 

 Japanese larch and the Douglas fir, and to a certain extent 

 the Sitka spruce, and what I maintain is that our experience 

 of their growth has altered the planting distances for those 

 particular trees. I confine myself to that." 



The Chairman : " If it may be a little worse for the tree I 

 rather hope it will be a little better for the pocket, and after all, 

 planting is a commercial business. I also agree that it is 

 very difficult always to assimilate the views of the forester, the 

 factors, and the proprietors. One is essentially in one sense out 

 for the tree, the other is out for what pays, and the third is 

 trying to keep a steady hold between the two. I have really 

 not had time to go into the subject fully, but I find the only 

 tree which is suitable for planting far apart is the Douglas fir. 



