Canadian Forestry Journal, June, igi6. 



573 



A Day in a Dutch Forest 



By H. R. MacMillan, Chief Forester of British Columbia, Read 



Before B. C. Forest Club, Victoria 



H. R. MacMillan 



Holland was originally heavily 

 forested, chiefly with oak forests. 

 Through wars, careless cutting, tire 

 and pressure of population, the 

 forest was gradually cleared away. 

 Large areas of land when denuded 

 of trees proved unsuitable for agri- 

 culture, and for hundreds of years 

 la}^ unproductive in the form of sand 

 dunes along the coast of the North 

 Sea, on the islands and the Interior 

 district of Arnhem, near the German 

 border; or where the land, though 

 sandy, was too level and too poorly 

 drained to form dunes, it became 

 known as heath. At the present 

 time there are in Holland 1,272,403 

 acres of heath. 



The land, forest and otherwise, as 

 elsewhere in Europe, has passed through various ownerships which have 

 profoundly aifected its present forest condition. In very early times title 

 was vested in "marks" under a German system of community ownership. 

 Dutch villages in Noord Brabant (152,000 acres) and in Limburg (98,664 

 acres) still own forest and heath land which they acquired in 1462 from 

 the French King who had before that time usurped the ownership of the 

 marks. The ownership by marks and French kings gradually merged in 

 ownership by the Counts of Holland, and by smaller owners who acquired 

 forest and heath domain from time to time. The land in the possession 

 of the Counts of Holland was in 1813 taken over by the state. The area 

 of the state land, forest and heath, in the forest districts now is 59,746 

 acres. 



Forest management of a kind began on some of these forests at a very 

 early date. The area which I visited near Breda, extending to the Belgian 

 frontier, where on the day of my visit the roar of the cannon could be heard, 

 first received silvicultural attention in 1514, when Count Hendrik von 

 Warsaw (whose city fell to his German compatriots on the day of my 

 visit) seeded the sandy heath with Scotspine and the loamier soils with oak, 

 forming a forest which still exists. In a similar manner, with but little plan 

 until the eighteenth century, land was seeded by various owners through- 

 out Holland and fine forests created, which have, without an}^ soil cover, 

 greatly exhausted the soil. 



Though the state took over the ownership of the forest lands in 1813, 

 but little advance was made in their management. Until about 1840 a 

 policy was followed by planting oak in pure stands three to four yards apart 

 for timber production in a rotation of 140 years. Then in 1840, according 



