COMPLEMENTARY WORK IN THE ORCANISATION OF COPSES. 2d9 



remuneration given to the guards, who acquit themselves well of 

 a task demanding so much care and skill. 



The pruning of the standards is a veritable plague in compound 

 copses. When it is resorted to, scarcely a single tree escapes the 

 operation, and we know of many a forest, in which it would now 

 be impossible to find a single tree, that has not been ruined by the 

 pruning to which it has been subjected. No formed tree can be 

 deprived of one or more of its large limbs without suffering a loss of 

 vigour and a marked derangement in its vital functions, and with- 

 out the production ot a wound injurious in itself and often fatal en 

 account of the various kinds of unsoundness it gives rise to in the 

 trunk itself of the tree. 



Among the standards, timber trees like the oak, which, consti- 

 tuting as they do, the most precious element of the forest and des- 

 tined to be spared for several more Rotations, cannot be pruned in 

 the strict sense of the term. To convince oneself of this, one need 

 only cut through the trunk of an oak that has been pruned some 

 years previously and observe for himself the deterioration and un- 

 soundness to be traced back to that operation. Except the removal 

 of the lower branches, already thin and half withered in consequence 

 of early suppression, of first class standards, it is never permissible 

 to touch the crowns of oak, ash, elm and other valuable trees. 



As regards the standards preserved chiefly as seedbearers, and 

 which can yield only firewood, people might be led to think that 

 there was advantage in pruning off their lower branches in order to 

 raise the leaf^canopy, thereby allowing a certain number of such 

 trees ( e. g. beech ) to be reserved without any serious injury to the 

 underwood. Here also pruning is more hurtful than useful, when- 

 ever it removes anything more than very thin branches, and these 

 only from young trees, like first and second class standards, the ob- 

 ject of the operation being, as we all know, simply to prevent the 

 growth of low overhanging boughs. But when such branches have 

 once developed themselves, their contribution towards the annual 

 increment of the trees to which they belong more than compensates 

 for the slight loss of growth suffered by the underwood. We must, 



17 



