98 ENGLISH ESTATE FORESTRY 



in the course of a hundred and twenty years. At a price 

 of 6d. per foot, such trees are of course fairly profitable, 

 as a considerable number can be grown to the acre, but 

 the difficulty lies in securing a customer who is willing 

 to take trees of these dimensions. They not only require 

 considerable horse or traction power to remove them, but 

 their great diameter entails a great deal of labour and 

 trouble when they come to be converted. In fact, in many 

 parts of the country large and knotty silver firs are practically 

 unsaleable, and it is not a species which can be strongly 

 recommended under present conditions. 



The Scots Fie {Pinus sylvestris). 



Although the Scots fir is popularly more closely asso- 

 ciated with Northern Britain than England, its distribution 

 is so general as a park and plantation tree in all parts of 

 the country that the term " Scotch " is scarcely appropriate 

 at the present day. Not only as a legitimate plantation 

 tree, but as a natural growth on thousands of acres of heath 

 land, the Scots fir has changed the character of many 

 districts in Hants, Surrey, and other parts of England, with 

 poor gravelly soils not grazed by sheep. Whether any 

 forests or tracts or woodland still exist which can claim to 

 be covered by the direct descendants of the indigenous Scots 

 fir of England, we do not know ; but in the Highlands of 

 Scotland numerous remains of natural fir forests still exist, 

 or have existed within recent times, and the timber they 

 produce is equal in quality to that produced in any part of 

 Europe. With abundance of land fit for nothing but growing 

 this tree on the one hand, and the enormous imports of 

 Scandinavian fir timber on the other, it seems an anomaly 

 that so little attention should be paid to its growth for 

 commercial purposes, and that even the best of that now 

 grown should be put to merely subordinate uses and com- 

 mand the lowest of prices. That this is due to any inherent 

 infirmity of the native species or strain there is little reason 

 to suppose, and it is evident that a more systematic and 

 intelligent method of growing it would produce timber fit 



