24 ENGLISH ESTATE FORESTRY 



as will enable them to form a full crop at, say, fifty years 

 of age. This distance is usually 12 feet, and the inter- 

 vening spaces are filled up with larch or other conifers. 

 Theoretically this is simple enough, and sometimes works 

 out as it should do ; but in most cases where ground game 

 is plentiful it is found that, by the twentieth year or so, a 

 great many of these hardwoods originally planted are no 

 longer there. The larch and other conifers are usually safe 

 from rabbit attack by the tenth or twelfth year, but oak, 

 ash, and beech are easily injured by rabbits long after this 

 age. The consequence is that after the wire netting is 

 removed or becomes gappy, and the mixed plantation it has 

 protected is exposed to rabbit attack, the hardwoods are 

 invariably attacked, and partly, if not entirely, destroyed. 

 On ground which is not adapted for bringing larch to 

 maturity, the result is obvious. After the so-called nurses 

 are removed or die out, an imperfect and gappy crop of 

 hardwoods remain, and this not only means a reduced crop 

 of timber, but also timber of rough and poor quality, owing 

 to the want of cleaning and drawing up of the stems. 



Another evil often attending such mixtures is due to the 

 different rates of growth of the species used, and which allows 

 one to be practically crushed out, while another develops a 

 head out of proportion to its size. This also leads to the 

 production of rough timber, and in many cases to the 

 plantation eventually becoming composed of a different species 

 to the one originally intended for it, owing to the latter having 

 been crushed out. 



But although the above causes are responsible for thin 

 or unprofitable woods in the early and middle-aged stages 

 of their existence, they are comparatively trivial to the 

 method of felling adopted in the great majority of cases 

 when English woods approach maturity. It is difficult to 

 fix any definite period at which this process can be said to 

 begin, as it is often a continuation of the thinning which 

 commences in the early stages, and never ceases until the 

 last tree is cut. But in any case the evil consists in 

 breaking up or reducing the leaf canopy of the wood, so 

 that weeds and rubbish cover the surface of the soil, and 

 light favours the production of adventitious shoots, etc. 



