140 OUR FORESTS AND WOODLANDS 
the other broad-leaved trees. The natural effect 
of this endowment is that when other trees are 
grown along with the beech, these must be from 
time to time protected against the latter during 
thinning operations, otherwise the beech would 
gradually crowd them out in course of time and 
grow gregariously, forming pure woods. 
The coppicing power of beech is somewhat 
limited in comparison with that of most other 
broad-leaved trees of our woodlands. It is, 
indeed, only in comparatively few districts that 
beech coppices prevail to any extent. It is really 
only suitable for coppice or as underwood in 
copse on limy soils, where the rotation is not 
below from twenty to thirty years. After about 
forty to fifty years of age the young trees, when 
once the bark has become thick and hard, lose 
their power of shooting from the stool. Hence 
the best treatment of the beech is to grow it as 
highwoods, and to reproduce it naturally from the 
beech-nuts or mast produced in fair abundance 
about once every three to five years. 
When grown along with the oak, it is well to 
cut it out in favour of the latter at about seventy 
to eighty years of age, and then reproduce it from 
