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Read Ebook: Remarks on the management or rather the mis-management of woods plantations and hedge-row timber by West J
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Ebook has 64 lines and 28175 words, and 2 pages
In any thing else but planting, the mischief of such a mistake, as producing that which was worthless when produced, would, in a short time, have cured itself; but so little of science, or even of common calculation, have been brought to bear upon the practice of Arboriculture, that, notwithstanding the evidence which is every where to be met with, of serious "loss and disappointment," for want of calculation, these matters go on very much as they "always have done."
I come now to remark upon the
Present mode of managing Plantations after they are made.
Abiding still, most strictly, by the rule laid down for myself, to deal with every part of my subject practically, I proceed to observe, that the instances where Plantations are treated with due regard to the principles of Arboricultural science, are not the rule, but the exceptions to the rule, as every scientific planter, who has looked round him, must know.
Instead of the trees intended for timber being nursed with the tenderest care from their infancy--instead of their being treated according to the known and fixed laws which regulate, and effectually control, the economy of vegetable life, whether men attend to them or not--they too frequently meet with treatment which is in direct opposition to those laws. I shall show this as clearly, and as plainly, as I can.
But when trees are not planted so thickly as to insure length of bole by natural pruning, they must be pruned with the knife and the bill-hook, and the earlier the operation is begun, the better.
Should any one demand of me before I close, some data on which he may judge whether or not a Plantation is in a condition requiring unusual attention, I offer the following:
First: If, upon examination, it be found that the trees intended for timber have not an aspect and position superior to the others which are around them:
Secondly: If, at any period after twenty years from the time of planting, it be found difficult to identify and point out the trees which are to be the final crop:
HEDGE-ROW TIMBER.
Although I have arranged my three propositions as above, I do not intend to bind myself to take them up again, and dispose of them in consecutive order: I have neither time nor the ability to adapt my "remarks" to the niceties of exact logical arrangement; it will be sufficient for me, if I shall succeed in leaving upon the minds of those who may read them, an impression of their truth. If that result is arrived at, it surely will be quite sufficient to draw the particular attention of proprietors to the subject; which will be more than half way towards securing the improvement which is so loudly called for; and that would be as much perhaps, as could at once be reasonably expected.
It may not be amiss to glance for an instant, at the value of the property about which I am writing. Few people, I imagine, have any proper conception of the aggregate amount. It is, of course, impossible to offer more than a conjecture on the subject; but probably it is not less, in England alone, than One Hundred Millions sterling!
I trust I may now conclude that I have satisfactorily proved, not only that the "magnitude of the sacrifice which the present practice involves is disproportionate to the good resulting," but that "the embellishment of a landscape does not necessarily include the perpetuity of any one race of Trees." In handling the remaining proposition, and in endeavouring to prove that the present treatment of Hedge-row Timber is "a perpetual offence against good taste," I shall at the same time, be accumulating evidence in support of the other two.
If Hedge-row Trees have length of bole, they have it--not because they were properly trained and assisted when they were young, and therefore needed it, but--in consequence, most likely, of indiscriminate lopping and pruning at some former period of their growth, the fruits of which, although now invisible to the unpracticed eye, will appear hereafter, to the dismay, and serious loss, of the person who may have to saw them up.
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