THE NEW FORESTRY. 1 1 I 



annual growth on many of the trees exceeded four feet We 

 strongly recommend the larch still to be planted in mixed 

 woods of hard-woods, where it holds its own well, and should 

 it become diseased it may be removed without serious loss of 

 crop. There are few larch plantations now in which the 

 disease is not more or less prevalent, and on some estates 

 where the original plantations of larch are still sound, and all 

 the conditions are favourable, the young plantations have 

 been ruined by the disease. The wood of the larch is used 

 for a great variety of purposes where strength and endurance 

 are required, but it is not so well known that it also makes 

 excellent furniture and may be both carved and polished, when 

 it is equal in appearance to pitch pine. We have seen articles 

 of this description that have lasted without warping or 

 shrinking for nearly forty years, but for such purposes the 

 wood of course requires to be seasoned. 



JAPANESE LARCH. Larix leptolepis. This larch, which 

 covers mountain tracts in Japan, has hitherto been described 

 as a small tree between thirty and forty feet high, and next to 

 worthless as a timber- tree. It has, however, been extensively 

 distributed since the first edition of this work was published, 

 and become better known. The author believes that he was the 

 first to recommend the species as a useful timber and orna- 

 mental tree, in the " Field," some years ago, which led to 

 inquiries, and he planted it both pure and mixed at Wortley 

 about the same time. Before then it was not quoted in 

 nurserymen's lists, and Messrs. Dickson & Co., Waterloo Place, 

 Edinburgh, were the first to raise and distribute stock of it, 

 through the enterprise of Mr. W. H. Massie. The tree was 

 introduced from Japan by Veitch in 1861, but was wrongly 

 described in Veitch's " Manual of the Conifera " as attaining 

 to less than half the height of the common larch, and inferior 

 to the latter both as an ornamental and timber tree ; whereas 

 examples growing at Blair Drummond, Perthshire, Munches, 

 and Kirkennan, Galloway, now thirty feet high, or thereabout, 

 and many younger examples, show that it grows as fast as the 

 European larch and is more ornamental. The Japanese larch 

 is not mentioned in Nesbit's edition of Brown's " Forester," 

 nor in Schlich's " Sylvicultural Notes on British Forest Trees," 

 but it has been very favourably noticed by planters during the 

 last few years as a good grower and disease resister. In 

 Professor Schwappach's recent report on Prussian experiments 

 with exotic trees he thus speaks of the Japanese larch : 



" Growth in youth is more rapid than in the case of the 



