488 



English Coppices and Copsewoods. 



standards must adapt itself to the crop as found at each 

 time of felling over the area, and that the number of standards 

 left is also influenced by the amount of shade they cast on 

 the underwood. 



Where the land is decidedly poor in quality, the question 

 may well arise whether it would not be more profitable to 

 work it as simple coppice, or else to clear it gradually and 

 replant with a crop of pines and firs. Indeed, it might often 

 pay well (if protection against rabbits can be secured) to 

 clear off all the marketable standards and plant up such 

 poor hags with alternate larch and Douglas fir (or else all 

 of the latter — and using stout plants in either case) at 10 by 10 

 feet (433 plants per acre), protecting them for a year or two 

 against their being outgrown by the coppice-shoots, and then 

 at the next fall of the underwood let the conifers grow up 

 into pole-forest. Any undergrowth springing from the stools 

 after that would be benificial to the larch and fir, even if not 

 worth cutting periodically, as in the past, for its own sake. 



J. NlSBET. 



