90 OLEACEiE 



frequently allowed to grow unheeded and neglected for 

 many years, without any attempt to improve their condi- 

 tion by gradual thinning and the necessary admission of 

 light and air. In consequence of this treatment, con- 

 tinued, perhaps, for a period of eighteen or twenty years, 

 or till the trees are supposed to be of sufficient size to 

 repay the cost of thinning, an unceasing contest for bare 

 existence has been going on, as each plant has been en- 

 gaged in deadly strife with its surrounding neighbours, 

 to obtain a glimpse of light and portion of air, the want 

 of which, beneath their tufted tops, soon deprives them of 

 all their lateral branches, (the natural feeders of the tree,) 

 and reduces them to the condition of weak, bare, unseemly 

 poles. In this enervated state, forced, as it were, in a 

 sort of hotbed, and drawn up to a height to which, when 

 exposed and thinned out, neither the bulk of their stem 

 or the spread of their roots is at all proportionate, the 

 axe is introduced, and that frequently to an extent that, 

 in well-managed plantations, would only be admitted after 

 gradual and repeated thinning. The consequence, as may 

 be supposed, of this sudden exposure of the weakened, 

 drawn-up plants to the influence of the winds and weather, 

 is the blowing over of many, and an immediate check to 

 the further growth and advance of the survivors, which 

 soon assume that stunted and hide-bound appearance 

 which so frequently meets and offends the eye, not only 

 in narrow and exposed belts, but in all plantations where 

 attention to proper and gradual thinning has been neg- 

 lected. It then becomes a question, what had best be 

 done with plantations reduced to this condition ? whether 

 they should be cleared entirely of their sickly tenants, 

 and the ground replanted with a new assortment of trees \ 

 or can a remedy be applied that would tend to renovate 



