158 THE NEW FORESTRY. 



In German forests it is difficult to tell artificial from natural 

 regeneration. What British foresters would call crowding to 

 an injurious degree is, in practice, the rule. Our methods of 

 frequent and severe thinning are simply regarded as wasteful 

 and excite astonishment in German foresters who visit this 

 country. In the first place, so far as we observed over 

 a large extent of the forest lands, the Germans do not plant 

 wider than from three to four feet under the most favourable 

 circumstances, and this width is adopted to save expense and 

 not because closer planting is objected to ; and at high eleva- 

 tions the distance is reduced to two feet or thereabout, and 

 two and three plants are put in each hole. Of course, the young 

 trees are not bought, as in Britain, from public nurseries, but 

 are raised in the woods and put out when about six inches 

 high at small cost. Where practicable, seed is sown on the 

 rough surface, and in large tracts, as in the case of the beech, 

 natural regeneration is trusted to, but the thinning afterwards 

 is the same in both cases. The first and great object is to 

 cover the ground as soon as possible, and establish an over- 

 head canopy, which is maintained unbroken till the end, or 

 nearly to the end of the rotation period, when the final crop 

 is swept away. Density, or crowding, is aimed at from the 

 first in order to shut out the light and air from the lower 

 branches and cause their decay, and at the same time to hasten 

 height-growth, even if it produces attenuated stems in the 

 early stages of growth. In thinning, the operator looks up, 

 and if the removal of a tree is going to make a gap overhead, 

 it is left. The consequence of regulating the trees in this 

 way is, that although the trees may have been planted at 

 regular distances at first, they do not all progress at the same 

 rate, and after one or two thinnings, regulated by the con- 

 dition of the tops, the trees become irregularly distributed 

 over the ground, standing in little groups of threes, fours, and 

 fives, not far apart, even at maturity. Plate No. 4 shows 

 this very plainly in the way the fine cylindrical trunks are 

 grouped together. In the best managed German forests a 

 comparatively small head of live branches is considered suffi- 

 cient to build up a tree of useful dimensions, and trees of 

 great girth are not aimed at, and could not be produced in 

 rotation period allowed. The first thinning or " cleaning " 



