98 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



small masses, in blocks of a few acres, or in strips or clumps, 

 planted for game, ornament, or shelter. In most counties it 

 would be impossible to show 100 acres of high-forest in a 

 single block ; yet a thousand contiguous acres of forest will 

 offer far better resistance to storm than 1000 acres distributed 

 in patches and strips over an estate of 10,000 acres. 



2. The last sentence requires a proviso, which leads us to 

 the second cause whereby wind damage is invited. The trees 

 on the thousand contiguous acres must be grown in close 

 canopy, offering an unbroken surface to the storm. This is pre- 

 cisely what British landowners have been taught during the last 

 250 years to avoid. " I conceive," wrote John Evelyn in his 

 inimitable Silva (1664), "that it were better to plant trees at 

 such distances as they may least incommode one another. For 

 timber-trees I would have none nearer than 40 feet where they 

 stand closest, especially of the spreading kind." Now Evelyn 

 was writing for southern and midland England, where the 

 natural tree-growth was oak and elm ; of the more northerly 

 parts of the island he knew nothing except by report. In his 

 day, and long after it, the timber most in request was oak, and 

 that not in clean straight boles, such as good foresters aim at 

 now, but crooked stuff for shipbuilding. It took 2200 mature 

 oaks of this description to build a single 74-gun ship, or the 

 entire mature crop of 44 acres, reckoned at 50 trees per acre 

 standing 30 feet apart. This was the origin of the old-fashioned 

 forester's rule of thumb, followed by most British landowners to 

 this day, that the distance from tree to tree should be one-third 

 of their height. The consequence has been ruinous and almost 

 universal over-thinning, even where the chief crop is not oak : 

 country gentlemen, who generally take much pride and interest 

 in their woods, dread nothing so much as that their trees should 

 be drawn up by overcrowding. Trees treated in this manner, 

 encouraged to form spreading heads and to grow branches 

 instead of boles, may be smashed or overturned by a storm 

 which would be lifted harmlessly over a wood presenting a close 

 canopy. 



3. Down to the close of the nineteenth century it was almost 

 impossible to point to any woodland, other than coppice, in 

 the United Kingdom managed according to a fixed working- 

 plan and in regular rotation. Woods were felled when they 



