1920=] Hutchins.—Growth of Trees .in Relation to Forestry. 5 
In recent years economies have been effected, but, on the other hand, 
necessary work such as full fire-protection and labourers’ houses has been 
left undone, and the cost of labour is ever rising ; so that it will be probably 
correct to estimate £65 per acre as the gross inclusive cost of full timber¬ 
planting in the future. Thus, as above, we have 16,000,000 acres X £65 
== £1,040,000,000. New Zealand at this date has 10J million acres of 
Government forest, besides a large area of Maori-owned forest, and a 
still larger area of forest alienated without demarcation, which must be 
reforested to render the land productive. To think of turning the in¬ 
digenous forests of New Zealand to forests of introduced trees straight 
away is a proposal only worthy of Don Quixote ! Nature may do this 
gradually in the future as the introduced trees spread themselves in the 
native forest. 
In the meantime it will be right to lay down full plantations of intro¬ 
duced trees in certain places. There are areas near towns where, even on 
good soil, suburban forests with their high returns can be established, and 
these will have to be all of introduced trees. But with regard to the 
general question, whether it is more economical to plant introduced trees 
at the cost of some £65 per acre, or to work the native forest by inter¬ 
planting “ standards ” and by thinning out the mature trees, there can be 
no doubt. The Forest League has published figures showing that after 
twenty-four years’ work and sinking over £2,000,000 the Government 
plantations, if they turn out well, may provide •§ f-Q of the forest requirements 
of the country, reckoned either by area or by timber. How far each (the 
native forest or plantations of introduced trees) can produce timber most 
economically can only be solved by a study of the circumstances of each 
case ; and when this is done systematically, and by experts able to look 
into the future of the forest for a hundred years hence, one gets to the 
forest “ working-plan.” The working-plan provides for just as much plant¬ 
ing as is necessary and no more. That is briefly the forest policy of every 
civilized forest country. 
In Europe, though the native forest-trees grow on an average only 
about half as quickly as those in New Zealand, the planting of exotics in 
the forest makes scarcely any progress. There are many exotics which 
would give a better return than the native trees, but, except in a restricted 
sense, this better return is considered not worth the risk and expense. 
Unwin’s Future Forest Trees gives a good account of what the Germans 
have done, and Huffel’s Economie forestiere of what the French have done. 
IT Introduction des essences exotiques en Belgique, by Comte Visart and 
Charles Bommer (75 Rue Terre-Neuve, Brussels, 1909), is a Belgian treatise 
which will well repay perusal, because the Belgians have not got the fine 
native forests of the French and Germans, and therefore look with a more 
favourable eye on exotics. The general position in central Europe is that 
quick-growing exotic timbers such as Douglas fir would give a yield-figure 
certainly larger than—perhaps double—that of the native trees. In Europe, 
any time during the last hundred years, individual trees growing many 
times as fast as the average forest-tree could be cited. I have seen ash in 
cultivation on a rich alluvial soil in the Rhine Valley growing 5 ft. per year 
(Journal of a Forest Tour, p. 65). As a forest-tree its average may be 
not much more than 6 in. Specially-bred poplars on rich soil show a 
similar growth Or, to take the same tree grown isolated or in the forest : 
in a close plantation of blue-gums on the Nilgiris, India, under forest 
conditions the diameter-growth was about one-eighth that of a blue-gum 
