78 BRITISH FOREST TREES 



rule, except where want of available labour has settled the 

 question in favour of sowing. No hard and fast rules can 

 be framed for the pine more than for any other kind of 

 forest tree, as in each case soil and situation and other 

 circumstances must all be taken into consideration before 

 any dictum can have genuine practical value ; but in general 

 the formation or the reproduction of pine forests is best 

 undertaken by means of planting, as then the distances at 

 which the plants shall stand, and the time at which the 

 young crop shall form canopy, are most easily determinable 

 by the owner. When the first and early thinnings are 

 remunerative, tolerably close planting and dense plantations 

 will naturally recommend themselves. 



Sowing. Under certain circumstances, however, sowing 

 has its recommendations. The supply of seedlings may 

 fail owing to grubs in the nurseries or other causes, the 

 available supply of labour may not be securable, or the soil 

 is perhaps not suitable for planting out young seedlings, 

 whilst the necessarily higher costs of planting up with 

 older transplants from nurseries may for one reason or 

 another not be considered desirable. 



Sowings are not always cheaper than planting, for a 

 certain amount of preparation of the soil for the reception of 

 seed is imperative to secure any fair measure of success ; 

 the filling up of blanks may at times be costly, and after all 

 the results may show that it would have proved a saving 

 both in time and money to have determined in favour of 

 planting at the outset. 



It is difficult to hit the happy medium in sowings of the 

 pine ; they are usually either too dense or too thin. In 

 the latter case, even with some assistance in the way of 

 planting, the crops often stand too open, and from the very 

 first, branch-development is unduly great ; in the former, 

 even with the frequent assistance of the bill in the way of 



