THINNING OF ADVANCED PINE PLANTATIONS. 163 



forests, where no artificial thinning has ever taken 

 place, there are to be found many hundreds of acres 

 of wood which no artificial forest or plantation can 

 surpass or even compare with in point of value. Any- 

 one who has examined the forests on Deeside, on Bal- 

 moral, Invercauld, and Mar estates, or Eothiemurchus, 

 Glenmore, and Abernethy, on Speyside, and many 

 others both at home and abroad, wUl support that 

 testimony. A few acres on Eothiemurchus estate is 

 worthy of special notice. When we examined it 

 twenty years ago, the trees stood on an average 9 feet 

 apart — some of them as wide as 1 5 feet, and others as 

 close as 2 feet. The market value of it per acre at 

 the time we saw it, allowing the trees to be all sound, 

 was worth at least £300 per acre. The ground itself 

 is the poorest possible — a light sandy gravel, with 

 a crisp dry herbage of heath and moss, certainly not 

 worth over Is. 6d. per acre per annum for grazing 

 purposes. 



The question here arises. How are plantations to be 

 managed that have been so thickly planted as to 

 require thinning to prevent the trees from growing up 

 disproportionately small ? The answer is, thin early 

 enough, and complete the operation before the side 

 branches touch each other, and before any of them 

 decay. This is advisable, not only for the preserva- 

 tion of the branches themselves, but in order that no 

 unfavourable change be produced upon the roots of 

 the trees, by admitting a degree of heat and air 

 amongst them to which they have not been accus- 

 tomed, and which they cannot endure without much 

 privation. 



In all forest operations by far too little attention is 

 paid to the roots of the trees. They are often planted 



