PROFITABLE TIMBER TREES 95 



so long as they are alive at all, they increase rather than 

 deteriorate in value, and will come in for something one 

 day. 



No doubt many would consider such an irregular and 

 uncertain process of thinning a source of danger to the 

 health of the main crop, and likely to favour disease. But, 

 although thick larch plantations are popularly supposed to 

 be hotbeds of disease, an observance of facts will at once 

 dispel any such illusion on this score. More often than 

 not, those parts of a plantation supposed to be most in need 

 of thinning are the healthiest in the wood, while the thin 

 portions are most diseased. Let this be as it may, we 

 contend that the less thinning a larch plantation gets 

 until it is twenty years of age, the more profitable it 

 will prove in the long-run. After the twentieth year the 

 gradual removal of suppressed trees may go on at the 

 forester's pleasure, and they will then be found to pay for 

 the labour of removal, and the supply will rarely exceed 

 the demand. But when, as sometimes happens, a plantation 

 is allowed to stand thick at first, and then suddenly thinned 

 heavily, bad results invariably follow. 



One of the most important factors in profitable larch- 

 growing is the cutting of the crop at the right time. As is 

 well known, the most troublesome feature in the larch crop 

 is its liability to heart-rot at any age. When once this rot 

 becomes universal, the only economic course is to cut the 

 crop clean, for every year it stands it deteriorates in value, 

 although it may be adding to its bulk at the same time. 

 Grown thick, and cut before serious damage is done in 

 this respect, a crop of larch may be made to pay at twenty 

 years of age, although none would cut it so early unless 

 compelled. The proper time to cut, when the trees keep 

 sound, is a few years after height-growth slackens off, and 

 when the annual rings begin to get narrow at the butt, 

 notations of from thirty to fifty years for small timber and 

 from fifty to eighty years for large will be found most 

 suitable, and it will generally be found that a thick crop 

 of long clean poles of moderate size turns out more profitable 

 than an open crop of large but coarse timber. The uses to 

 which the greater part of larch timber are put do not 



