JARDINAGE OR THE SELECTION METHOD. 369 



interference with the leaf-canopy. On the other hand, when the 

 number of dead and deteriorating trees is large, as may well hap- 

 pen in the class of forests handed to us by past improvidence, the 

 fellings must pass quickly through the forest until such material 

 has been utilised. 



As the jardinage operations necessarily spread over a compara- 

 tively large area and take place in the midst of close growing 

 stock of all ages, the felling and export must be eflfected with very 

 great care. Where young growth of broad-leaved species has 

 been badly injured, it should be cut back to enable it to reform 

 itself properly. 



Recourse to artificial methods vaW rarely be needed except to 

 introduce an absent species or to increase the proportioii of one 

 that is insufficiently represented. 



Value and employment of the method. Since regeneration 

 never ceases anywhere, the regeneration and the education of the 

 forest, two operations that are never coincident in any other 

 method, must here go on hand in hand together ; and jardinage 

 is therefore not merely a method of regeneration, but really a 

 complete method of treatment. It is nature's own method, for in 

 it nothing is done to force her out of the lines she has laid down 

 for herself; only the way is rendered easier for her to follow upon 

 these lines. 



From what precedes it will be seen that jardinage is not the rude 

 and primitive method of treatment which most European books 

 decry as fit only to be employed there where no other method is 

 practicable. Understood in its true sense, it takes front rank side 

 by side vrith the three preceding methods already described. In- 

 deed, an intensive jardinage borders so closely upon the group 

 method that the boundary line between the two is scarcely to be 

 distinguished, and the latter is thus seen to be really the connecting 

 link between the uniform method on the one hand and jardinage on 

 the other — an attempt to treat every portion of a forest on its own 

 merits while striving as much as possible to localise the various 

 age-classes. 



Allusion has just been made to intensive jardinage. Wliile the 

 system may be made as intensive as one likes, so that it practically 

 merges into so elaborate a system as the group method, it can, on 

 the other hand, be made as simple as possible and reduced to the 

 extraction of only a few trees a year belonging to a single species 

 out of many composing the forest. Moreover, as the fellings are 

 made solely over advance growth, only as many trees as are re- 



