THE LARCH. 225. 
sery lines often renew their tops or leading shoots. Removal 
by transplantation into nursery lines, or into the forest, has a 
tendency to stop a luxuriant growth, and to harden and sus- 
tain the plant for a short time against the severity of frost. 
The period of the larch’s greatest vigour is that at which it is 
most likely to suffer; that occurs near the time it is about 
to assume a timber size, or from twelve to twenty feet in 
height—more or less in some plantations,—dependent, to some 
extent, on the nature of the soil, and on the seasons. The 
period of the greatest vigour of the larch is readily ascer- 
tained by inspecting the concentric circles on the stump of a 
felled tree in the same description of soil. 
The failure of the tree at this period of its growth in many 
districts throughout Scotland arises purely from its being too 
tender ; and its display of dead wood, with a few young shoots 
emerging here and there from its stem, are just the symptoms 
which all half-hardy plants present when frost-bitten. 
Another prevailing mistake in larch management through- 
out Scotland is the neglect of early thinning. The confinement 
to which it is subjected just at the period it attains the size 
of a timber tree, when commonly from ten to twenty years of 
age, and frequently afterwards, is an immense loss to land- 
owners and to the country at large. No other tree is so 
speedily ruined for want of sufficient space. The larch leaves 
are tender and minute, they present only a small surface to 
the influences of the atmosphere, and therefore, in a crowded 
plantation formed of trees of the same size, and situated on a 
level surface, the leaves fail to elaborate the sap necessary for 
the formation of timber, and the trunk becomes, and continues 
to be, bark-bound, bare, and stunted. On its native Alps it 
enjoys an inequality of surface, which furnishes more space 
for its foliage, and a better exposure to light; there also it 
possesses an advantage which always accompanies indigenous 
forests—that of the trees being very unequal in size and in 
age. Close planting is certainly necessary in rearing larch 
timber in bleak and exposed situations. It prevents the play 
of the biting winds on the surface of the ground, particularly 
P 
