Afforesting Waste Lands and Financial Returns 283 



15,000,000 acres of waste land 1,000,000 to afforesting and 

 14,000,000 to game preserves, deer forests and rough pasture. 



Having personally explored much of the mountain and 

 heath lands in England and Scotland, and some of the vast 

 tracts of bog land in Ireland (the latter extending to fully 

 one million acres), I have carefully computed that of land 

 up to 1,200 feet altitude, where timber would grow perfectly 

 well, about 9,000,000 acres are available for afforesting 

 purposes. As far as I have been able to find out, the average 

 rental of the ground referred to is a fraction under 3s. per 

 acre, and I am quite confident that any land which does not 

 bring in at least three times that amount for grazing or 

 agricultural purposes would be more profitably employed 

 in carrying a crop of timber. 



It is unfortunate that much of these waste lands are 

 private property, the owners of which, even could they 

 afford it, have little inclination to sink, for a period of say 

 twenty years, the necessary capital required to be expended 

 on the formation of woods and plantations. Equally unfor- 

 tunate is it that owing to an injudicious system of manage- 

 ment many plantations in this country have been wrongly 

 formed in so far as adaptation of soil and trees are con- 

 cerned, the results being that financially speaking the woods 

 are a failure, and proprietors in consequence fight shy of 

 further planting operations. I have examined and reported 

 on several of such woods in various parts of the country, 

 one of the most noticeable being in Nottinghamshire, where 

 a large area of ground was planted with a crop of oak, for 

 which tree the soil was quite unsuitable, the result being that 

 over the whole ground the average production of timber per 

 tree was under 10 cubic feet in sixty years. When pressing 

 home the question of woodland extension I have frequently 

 been confronted by the argument that past experience does 

 not warrant further expenditure in that way. That this is 

 true cannot be denied, but let us hope that it will be remedied 

 in the near future by the better education of our foresters 

 and by greater attention being given to the relation of trees 

 and soil. 



With the wholesale felling of timber for war purposes 



