13 



A DISCOURSE 



INTROD. 8. In the mean time, it has been stiffly controverted by some, whether 

 "■'^'y'^ it were better to raise trees for timber and the like uses, from their seeds 

 and first rudiments ; or to transplant such as we find have either raised 

 themselves from their seeds, or sprung from the mother-roots. Now that 

 to produce them immediately of the seed is the better way, these reasons 

 may seem to evince. 



JFi?'st, Because they take soonest. Secondly, Because they make the 

 straightest and most uniform shoot, IViii'dhj, Because they will neither 

 require staking nor watering, which are two very considerable articles. 

 And, lastly. For that all transplanting, (though it much improves fruit- 

 trees,) unless they are taken up the first year or two, is a considerable 

 impediment to the growth of forest-trees : And though it be true, that 

 divers of those w^hich are found in woods, especially oaklings, young 

 beeches, ash, and some others, spring from the self-sown mast and keys ; 

 yet being for the most part dropped, and disseminated among the half- 

 rotten sticks, musty leaves, and perplexities of the mother-roots, they 

 grow scraggy, and, being over-dripped, become squalid and apt to 

 gather moss : 



Crescentique adimunt foetus, uruntque ferentem. geor. lib. ii. 



Which checks their growth, and makes their bodies pine. 



Nor can their roots expand, and spread themselves as they would do, if 

 they were sown, or had been planted in a more open, free, and ingenuous 

 soil. And that this is so, I do affirm upon experience, that an acorn, 

 sown by hand in a nursery, or ground where it may be free from these 

 incumbrances, shall in two or three years outstrip a plant of twdce that 

 age, which has either been self-sown in the woods, or removed, unless it 

 fortune, by some favourable accident, to have been scattered into a rnore 

 natural, penetrable, and better qualified place ; but this disproportion is 

 yet infinitely more remarkable in the Pine and the Walnut-tree, where 

 the nut, set into the ground, does usually overtake a tree of ten years 

 growth which was planted at the same instant ; and this is a secret so gene- 

 rally misrepresented by most of those who have treated of these sorts of 

 trees, that I could not suffer it to pass over without a particular remark ; 

 so as the noble poet (with pardon for receding from so venerable autho- 

 rity) might be mistaken, when he delivers this observation as universal, 

 to the prejudice of sowing, and raising woods from their rudiments : 



