I30 ENGLISH ESTATE FORESTRY 



the prevailing soil and climate tend to counteract the effect 

 of thinning in Scotland to a greater extent than they do in 

 England, and the same degree of thinning would have a 

 different effect upon a high-lying plantation in poor soil in 

 the one country to what it would on a low-lying plantation 

 in England. The usual error of Scotch foresters, therefore, 

 was chiefly due to a failure to discriminate between the 

 different conditions which prevailed in the two countries, 

 and was not altogether the fault of Scotch forestry itself. 



But while Scotch foresters probably did much to intro- 

 duce the modern practice of thinning, the fact must not be 

 overlooked that the prominence given to the existence of 

 game cover tended to work in the same direction. When 

 the old coppice with standards was the prevailing form of 

 sylviculture, nothing more was desired by the sportsman 

 or keeper for sheltering pheasants or ground game. But 

 with the ordinary plantation all ground vegetation, which 

 constitutes the most valuable form of cover, gradually 

 disappears when close canopy is once established and the 

 surface becomes as bare as a fallow. Perfect as such a 

 condition may be for sylviculture, it is far from the sports- 

 man's ideal, and it was, and still is, often the forester's lot to 

 receive orders to break up this canopy by heavy thinning, 

 and plant shrubs or other game-cover plants below. In 

 small woods such cover is regarded by the owner as more 

 valuable than the timber which stands amongst it, and it is 

 of little avail for the forester to point out the evils which 

 follow such a course where pheasant rearing is the chief 

 object the woodland proprietor has in view. Whether the 

 increased value of the wood for shooting purposes compensates 

 for the loss in quality and quantity of the timber produced, 

 is a difficult question to decide ; but one thing is certain, 

 that the cost of replanting old woodland is at least doubled 

 by the weeds and rubbish which accumulate during the 

 latter half of the rotation in open woods. 



The above are, we believe, the chief, and in many cases 

 the only, reasons for the heavy thinning of woods under forty 

 or fifty years of age, before which the trees are hardly large 

 enough to be classed as timber or to be of much value. In 

 larch plantations, or those in which larch has been used as 



