INTERMEDIATE CUTTINGS 105 



CARE OF THE STAND AFTER REGENERATION 



Intermediate Cuttings. — Especially with natural regeneration, clean- 

 ings, thinnings, and improvement cuttings are particularly important.^^ 

 With natural regeneration there are always weed trees to be cleaned 

 out of the stand, and valuable seedHngs and saplings to be protected 

 and favored; the over-dense stands must be thinned to prevent undue 

 competition; and later on the stand must be continually improved by 

 the eUmination of the poorer specimens. According to Bardrillart a 

 cleaning "is a cutting designed to clean or 'purge,' as one might say, 

 a forest of a part of the wood, briars, brush, weed trees that damage the 

 growth, or trees that are dead or dying, or too numerous." It is very 

 much like weeding a garden. As a rule, private owners in Prance over- 

 look the necessity of weeding or cleaning their forests because there is 

 a definite expense involved. The French employ the term "to free a 

 stand" as synonymous with the term "to clean," with the slight differ- 

 ence that they free a valuable species from crowding while they clean 

 out a seed tree to avoid injurious competition. According to Jolyet 

 "the chief aim of a thinning is always to favor the growth of the best 

 trees ... to maintain a stand in the best vegetative condition, 

 or a mixture in the desired proportions . . . and to increase the 

 yield." It thus appears that thinnings also free and clean the stand, 

 but at a later period in its development, and their main objective is to 

 increase the growth by reducing unnecessary competition for hght and 

 growing species, and at the same time realize merchantable timber. 



In France the term "improvement cutting" means, as the words 

 imply, the improvement of the stand by thinnings, or fellings which yield 

 money returns. There appears to be no clearcut distinction as to the 

 age of the stand when improvement feUings are appUed, as may be seen 

 by the quotation from the Malmifait working plan (p. 112). 



From the standpoint of silviculture it is essential that intermediate 

 cuttings be ordered, in current working plans, by area and not by volume. 

 Forest valuation should never interfere, as it has in the past, with silvi- 

 culture. If the forester aims at checking excessive cuts he should pre- 

 scribe the area to be cut over each year with a maximum volume merely 

 as a check. Too often in the past the French forester has marked an im- 

 provement cutting in a compartment only to find that it could not be 

 properly executed because the working plan prescribed a maximum cut 

 of 80 cords, whereas the marking properly executed should remove 

 180 cords. Happily errors due to restraining the silviculturalist from 



" In France the marking, which requires real technique, is always done under the 

 personal supervision of a forest assistant, assistant supervisor, or supervisor. Even 

 district foresters take part in important marking conferences. 



