THE NEW FORESTRY. 



trees, but grow fast in plantations where they are not likely 

 to overtop their neighbours and expose their tops to winds. 



SECTION III. DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF SPECIES. 



The following list is intended principally for the use of 

 planters and those who have timber-trees to dispose of. The 

 descriptions are taken chiefly from numerous carefully recorded 

 observations of our own, made in woods where the trees have 

 grown up in dense masses or groups, wherever these could be 

 found, in different parts of England and Scotland, and may be 

 relied upon as being near the mark. The behaviour of trees 

 under dense plantation culture is, we conceive, what the timber- 

 grower needs to understand first of all. In almost every work 

 on forestry in the past, the descriptions of our forest trees are 

 taken from park, garden and hedge-row examples alone, and are 

 consequently quite misleading. Probably for every tree grown 

 under the last-named conditions there are thousands grown in 

 plantations, to which a quite different description would apply. 

 Take the oak, for example, as described by a well-known 

 writer on forest trees. It is, we are told, a massive-stemmed, 

 spreading, flat-topped tree ; whereas under true plantation 

 culture it would be more correctly described as a tall, branch- 

 less, stemmed tree, with a small, round top.* Again, the 

 common alder is described as an almost worthless timber-tree, 

 seldom attaining a height of more than forty feet except where 

 attention is paid to it. This is a good enough description of 

 the rough and worthless riverside specimen, but we have seen 

 alder, and sold it out of a thick wood where no attention had 

 been bestowed upon it, nearly seventy feet high, the result 

 simply of plantation culture ; and we have examples in the 

 woods here now of that height, branchless and shapely for fifty 

 feet up, squaring ' about ten inches at that height and over 

 sixteen inches at the bottom. These examples are growing 

 among oak and ash of the same shape. Indeed the difference 

 that plantation culture and density produces on a tree in 

 increasing its length of trunk and altering its shape and 

 general habit of growth is not sufficiently understood except 

 by those who are familiar with our forest trees. 



The prices given in the following list are the average 

 prices ruling now, 1898, or thereabout, and are for plantation 

 timber, standing in the wood, after allowing for the cost of 

 * See Plates No. 8 and 9. 



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