76 ENGLISH ESTATE FORESTRY 



by excessive thinning. As everyone knows, the nature of 

 beech renders woods composed of it chiefly or entirely thin 

 and bare on the surface, and rabbits rarely make such woods 

 their home, nor will they form cover for pheasants. In 

 very large woods, where all age classes are more or less 

 represented, this characteristic is not of so much importance, 

 as soil, accident, and the age of the group will produce a 

 great deal of temporary cover which will serve the purpose. 

 But small and even-aged woods of beech contain from the 

 pole stage up to maturity practically nothing that can be 

 termed cover, unless ruined by excessive thinning Without 

 rabbits, the constant crops of seedlings, which manage to 

 exist wherever a httle light can reach the ground, improve 

 matters to some extent ; for young beech, keeping its leaves 

 for the first ten and fifteen years through the winter, provides 

 more cover than most deciduous trees. But where these 

 seedlings are kept down, as they usually are where ground- 

 game is preserved to any extent, a beech wood, or one in 

 which beech predominates, usually gets a bad name from the 

 gamekeeper and sportsman, and, where game cover ranks 

 before timber, it is easy to see what weight this objection 

 to beech carries. 



But the planter can usually introduce beech into his 

 mixtures without advertising the fact too extensively, and, 

 when grown clean and tall, its presence is not noticed so 

 much in a mixed plantation, and fewer objections are raised 

 to it. As already said, its uses are great in assisting other 

 species on dry soils, but probably oak and larch are the two 

 trees which benefit most from its company, although one is 

 a deep- and the other a shallow-rooting species. In both 

 cases its leaves act as a mulch on the surface, and it keeps in 

 moisture and keeps out weeds ; but its chief value with the 

 oak lies in its dense shade about the stems of the trees, and 

 effectually checking that growth of water-shoots which do so 

 much to check the vigorous growth of that tree after middle 

 age. Tall clean oaks will often be found amongst beech, 

 which could not have been produced by any other means, and 

 even its own timber, when clean, is not to be despised as a 

 rent yielder. Grown with larch, it keeps that tree much 

 more healthy than when grown alone or with other species, 



