268 BRITISH FOREST TREES 



avenues, one of the best known being that on the Wimpole 

 Estate, in Hertfordshire, consisting of a double row nearly 

 three miles in length. 



Where grown in woods, the culture of the elm should be 

 confined to warm, sunny exposures, and to soils un- 

 doubtedly congenial to it, such as the moist patches suited 

 to the ash, the better qualities of binding soils that are just 

 a little too tenacious for the oak, fertile marshy land, good 

 loamy or moist, humose, sandy soil, and the fresh, better 

 classes of beech soils ; for, on the whole, elms undoubtedly 

 belong to the species that make considerable demands in 

 regard to the quality of the soil. 



Elms are as little qualified by nature as ash and maples 

 to form pure forests, or even clumps or groups, and in 

 general their sylvicultural characteristics and treatment 

 exhibit very close resemblances to these species; their proper 

 position is as single stems in mixed crops. But where, 

 either intentionally or through force of circumstances, they 

 have grown up in large patches or groups, they should be 

 thinned out when their chief growth in height has been 

 completed, and when the natural desire for lateral develop- 

 ment begins to make itself distinctly apparent ; after that 

 they should be underplanted with beech or hornbeam, 

 silver fir or spruce, according as the nature of the soil, and 

 the wishes and interests of the proprietor, indicate one or 

 other of these species as preferable. When grown among 

 oaks and beeches, elm has sometimes, if lagging behind 

 in growth in height, to be cut out about fifty to sixty years 

 of age ; but, in the majority of cases, on suitable soils it can 

 maintain its crown dominant among the neighbouring trees, 

 and can well hold out the full rotation of the latter, being 

 then removed during the first or second reproductive fell- 

 ings at ninety to a hundred years of age, as a large-girthed 

 stem of considerable technical value. 



