THINNING 39 



greatest individual value, the trees must be 

 allowed to grow to full maturity, in a rotation 

 of 180 or 200 years, and the number of first- 

 class trees will at the final cutting be between 

 ten and twenty per acre. It is probable that 

 in most cases an earlier sale would be more 

 remunerative, because the annual increment of 

 an old oak wood may be only small. 



Mixed oak and larch plantations are thinned 

 on the principle that a good oak, when it is 

 overshadowed by a larch, must be protected by 

 the removal of the larch. If the threatened oak 

 is unlikely to grow into a good tree, a larch may 

 be allowed to replace it. The difficulty in the 

 management of such a plantation is that the 

 protection of the oak requires the removal of 

 some larch at short intervals of two or three 

 years. Small thinnings are unremunerative, and 

 therefore liable to be neglected, with the result 

 that the quick-growing larch overpowers the 

 slow-growing oak. There will possibly be some 

 parts of the wood in which the oaks are not 

 sufficient in number to form a full crop ; these 

 parts should each be treated as a larch wood. 



