PROFITABLE TIMBER TREES 89 



timber per acre per annum is not an exceptional occurrence 

 in healthy larch woods, and when it is considered that the 

 value of a crop per cubic foot is often as great at twenty or 

 thirty years of age as it is at fifty or sixty, the opportunity it 

 presents to landowners to get a quick return for their money 

 is self-evident. For either pit-wood or fencing purposes pure 

 crops of larch may be advantageously cut at forty years of 

 age in many soils ; and it is very doubtful if it pays as well 

 to grow heavy timber by allowing it to stand seventy, eighty, 

 or a hundred years, as it does to grow a thicker crop for 

 about half the time and then clear it off the ground at once. 

 Of course, where an ideal larch soil exists, it is a pity not to 

 take advantage of it and allow the crop to stand as long as it 

 is growing and keeping sound at the heart. But in the 

 majority of soils sound larch, after it has reached fifty years 

 or so, is the exception rather than the rule, and when once it 

 begins to decay at the heart no useful purpose is gained by 

 keeping it standing. 



The date of the first introduction of this tree to England 

 is not known with certainty. Parkinson mentions it as being 

 cultivated as a garden specimen as early as 1629. Evelyn 

 praises its good qualities, but more on the strength of what 

 was known of it in Europe than experience of English-grown 

 timber. There is little doubt that its introduction on a large 

 scale, and its universal planting as a forest tree, was due to 

 the Duke of Atholl, who, in the period from 1774 to 1829, 

 planted about fifteen thousand acres chiefly with this tree. 

 In 1783 the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and 

 Manufactures offered a gold medal annually to planters of 

 four hundred larches in England, and we learn that about 

 1,240,000 trees were planted from 1783 to 1805, more or 

 less through this agency. 



For the last sixty or eighty years the planting of pure 

 larch plantations in England has gone on to a very great 

 extent, and, although many of the original plantations have 

 now disappeared, a few remnants occur here and there as 

 evidence that this tree had a very wide and general distribu- 

 tion in the early part of the last century. But the finest 

 specimens of old larch in this country occur in most cases 

 where they were planted amongst hardwoods, or in situations 



