THE NEW FORESTRY. 139 



the size and price of trees, the number to the acre, the species 

 used, and whether bought or raised in the home nursery. But 

 no forester need be in any difficulty on this head. All he has 

 to do is to decide what the species are to be planted, to 

 ascertain their size and value per thousand from a price 

 list, find his own rates for labour and preparation, and the total 

 will give him the nearly exact figure. 



SECION XVII. — PLANTING UNEVEN AGED WOODS. 



This is a method of planting with which British foresters 

 are not familiar, as practiced on the Continent, and we cannot 

 say that it is a plan adapted to British , woods on private 

 estates, because of the danger of the work being suspended 

 from any cause during the long interval of regeneration or 

 planting required. The uneven aged system has been adopted 

 in Germany, as yet on a limited scale, with the object of 

 reducing the labour of tending mixed woods of species varying 

 greatly in rate of growth, and in which the strong species 

 may crush out the weaker. The method consists, practically, 

 in planting the weaker species only at the beginning and 

 following with the stronger species later, at intervals of 

 years if necessary, so as to handicap the latter, to use 

 a well-known phrase. In the chapters on mixed and 

 pure forests, we have suggested a method of dispensing 

 with the uneven aged system by selecting the species 

 carefully, with an eye to similarity of habit, for mixed 

 woods, and the reader is referred to that chapter. The 

 most note-worthy example we have seen of an uneven aged 

 forest was in the Hartz Mountains, near Lauterberg, where 

 spruce was planted ten years after the beech, and had over- 

 topped the later by twenty feet, the trees being past middle 

 age. Uneven aged woods, as the term is understood in 

 Britain, consist of woods containing trees of various ages that 

 have been planted from time to time in over-thinned woods 

 approaching maturity, or trees from old stools in woods 

 from which timber has been removed. There has been much 

 aimless planting in this way, owing to the absence of any 

 definite system of clear cutting or rotation on estates. Woods 

 grow up till they have nearly reached maturity, and are over- 

 thinned and filled up again with young trees. Later another 

 fall of timber of the older trees is probably taken out of the 

 wood, and the trees falling on the later planted ones injure and 



