io8 ENGLISH ESTATE FORESTRY 



THE SPRUCE (Picea excelsa). 



Whether the common spruce can be termed a profitable 

 timber tree or not may well be doubted by most foresters. 

 The experience of most is that it is difficult to dispose of 

 at any price, and many consider themselves fortunate if they 

 can get 6d. per foot for it. It must be admitted, however, 

 that a really clean crop of spruce is not often met with in 

 this country. Like Scots fir, it is too often stuck in as a so- 

 called nurse to other species, with the result that its lateral 

 growth is unchecked, and its stem is coarse and knotty. 

 Most timber merchants look upon coarse and knotty spruce 

 timber as the dregs of the home market, and will scarcely 

 have it as a gift, and it is equally useless for most estate 

 purposes. Grown in close order, however, from the start, 

 home-grown spruce ought not to be such an unsaleable article 

 after all, although anything like a high price per cubic foot 

 is of course out of the question. Its chief virtue, such as it 

 is, lies in its capability of producing a heavy crop of timber 

 on heavy cold soils, which will grow little else to advantage. 

 It being one of the shallowest of rooters, it will grow on a 

 thin surface soil, or one which is waterlogged a foot below 

 the surface, and where deeper-rooting trees would languish 

 and die in a few years. On such soils it forms a network of 

 roots on the surface of the ground, and will furnish a dry 

 footing on the stickiest of soils. 



Many heavy clay soils which have been planted with oak 

 or ash at one time or another within the last two or three 

 hundred years, and which have yielded next to nothing in the 

 shape of timber, would have produced crops of spruce of a 

 more profitable nature than the hardwoods, had the former 

 been properly grown from the start. The low value of the 

 timber would have been more than balanced by the increased 

 yield, for a crop of GOOO to 8000 feet of spruce at eighty to 

 a hundred years of age is better than 1000 to 1500 feet 

 of oak in the same time, and it is nothing uncommon to find 

 oak plantations of eighty years of age with not more than 

 1000 feet of timber in them per acre. Even putting the 

 spruce as low as 3d. per foot, a value of 75 to 100 per acre 



