PROFITABLE TIMBER TREES 79 



another twenty or thirty years. A beech wood grown in 

 close order may be expected to make its most rapid increase 

 in timber between fifty and a hundred years of age, and before 

 that period to be chiefly occupied in lengthening and cleaning 

 its stems. Worked on the system that now prevails, close 

 order over a large area is of course impossible, and that 

 cleanliness of stem can rarely be obtained which is char- 

 acteristic of ordinary high forest ; but when an attempt is 

 made to encourage the growth of the trees in groups of even- 

 age, it is possible to obtain a fair proportion of clean stems 

 which grow under somewhat similar conditions to those pre- 

 vailing in even-aged woods, and produce the same class of 

 timber. But when cut to excess and not given time to 

 develop clean stems, these groups are thinned out and inter- 

 fered with to an extent which opens out the wood and allows 

 the development, or partial development, of individual trees 

 at the expense of those round about them, and we then get 

 that picture of badly shaped trees in the older-age classes, 

 and the suppression of the young crop by their low and 

 spreading crowns. In this way many woods which have 

 produced useful crops of timber in the past are now rendered 

 valueless for the time being, and the surface of the ground 

 choked with brambles, coarse grass, and weeds, which prevent 

 the plentiful crops of seed from germinating as they do 

 where the seed bed is preserved by thick shade. 



There is little doubt that the most profitable and satis- 

 factory way of dealing with beech woods is that system 

 known as the " shelter wood compartment system." This 

 system may be briefly described as follows : Twenty or 

 thirty years before the final felling an attempt is made to 

 bring about a crop of self-sown seedlings, by thinning out 

 the trees to about half their previous density. This thinning 

 not only conduces to heavier crops of seed on the remaining 

 trees, but also improves the condition of the surface by 

 allowing the raw humus to decay. The first good seed year 

 after this thinning usually results in a plentiful crop of 

 seedlings, and the future treatment of the old crop consists 

 in gradually removing it to allow these seedlings to develop. 

 For the first eight or ten years little is required, but after 

 that the old trees are again thinned to admit light to the 



