64 ENGLISH ESTATE FORESTRY 



culminated. The great difficulty with oak when planted 

 with other species of a profitable nature lies in its tendency 

 to throw out adventitious shoots from the stem and get into 

 a stunted state when the wood is thinned and light is 

 admitted to the boles of the trees. Not thinned and left to 

 fight its own way, rarely results in more than two or three 

 trees per acre developing into big timber, and even then a 

 much longer period is required to mature them than most 

 species with which they are mixed. Planted pure or with 

 subordinate species, such as beech, it is, as already said, 

 unprofitable as thinnings, and involves a long wait before 

 anything can be returned to the planter. It is not a tree 

 adapted for the quick profits which are looked for nowadays, 

 nor is it one which will give good results with careless 

 thinning and long periods of neglect. This, together with 

 the class of soil necessary to bring it to perfection, renders 

 oak, although one of the most valuable as timber, yet one of 

 the least profitable species for the planter in this country. 



Bad as the results of oak-planting usually are on the 

 best soils, however, they are much worse on unsuitable ones. 

 On a deep naturally drained clayey loam, out of the reach of 

 every spring frost and the most exposed situations, the oak 

 can often be grown without loss, if with little profit. On 

 deep sands or light loams, or even gravels, mixed with beech 

 and larch, it may produce small but clean timber useful for 

 fencing and cleaving, and help to raise the average price of 

 the crop. But on low-lying, stiff, and wet clays, or shallow 

 soils of any kind, oak is one of the worst trees to plant with 

 any idea of profit, and many thousands of pounds have been 

 thrown away in the past in an attempt to grow it on such 

 soils. On clay soils, it is true, little fault can be found 

 with its soundness, but unless they are well drained its 

 growth is too slow to yield more than a few feet per acre 

 annually, and much of this is often of inferior quality. 

 To drain such soils artificially not only means a heavy out- 

 lay at the start, but a heavy annual or periodic expendi- 

 ture throughout the rotation. How great a drag upon an 

 otherwise profitable crop draining becomes, is rarely realised 

 by foresters as it deserves to be, and, as often as not, 

 heavy draining expenses are augmented by extra labour on 



