90 ENGLISH ESTATE FORESTRY 



outside the ordinary plantation, such as pleasure-grounds, the 

 margins of streams, and so on, where they have accidentally 

 met with the conditions they love and have escaped the axe 

 of the woodman. We know of some exceptionally fine trees 

 being cut a few years back which were grown amongst oak 

 and Scots fir on a loamy gravel, and were just over a hun- 

 dred years of age. These trees contained from 50 to 100 

 cubic feet of timber, and the butts were perfectly firm and 

 sound, and showed little of that foxy character so common in 

 the timber of modern larch woods. It is more than probable 

 that the frequent complaints of disease and heart-rot in the 

 trees of plantations nowadays is greatly due to this change 

 in growing them, as the shade and humus layer which 

 hardwoods produce, especially beech, keep the surface soil 

 in a better condition for the roots of a surface feeder like 

 the larch than the humus layer produced by conifers, which 

 is invariably dry and musty. 



The soils on which larch will thrive or fail are so 

 numerous, and the situations in which it succeeds or becomes 

 diseased are so varied, that it is an extremely difficult matter 

 to describe the exact conditions which are necessary for it to 

 succeed or which bring about failure. Good and bad specimens 

 may be found in pure sand and in stiff clay, in wet soils and 

 in dry, on the summit of a hill or the bottom of a ravine. 

 One is rarely justified in saying, therefore, that any hitherto 

 unplanted soil will or will not grow larch, and the uncertainty 

 is greatly increased owing to our limited knowledge of the 

 conditions of things below the surface. A dry soil may 

 surround the site of hidden springs, or a bed of gravel may 

 underlie a clay surface soil. A trial hole here and there may 

 settle the point in an imperfect way, but we cannot always 

 be sure by such means as to whether such spots are fairly 

 typical of the situation or not. 



It has long been an established belief that the best soil for 

 larch is a porous, well-drained, but fairly moist gravel, such 

 as is frequently found on hillsides, which are covered more or 

 less by the detritus of the solid rock beneath, and that fallen 

 from higher levels. Such soils are usually kept cool and 

 moist by springs and natural reservoirs fed by winter rains, 

 and approximate closely to those in which the larch grows 



