following; and as the trees are growing fast, considers that it might now be valued at the same price per acre. Sir John considers, from experience in his own plantations, that planted beech will do as well as when naturally seeded. His old woodman, now dead, was for long of a contrary opinion, but changed his mind latterly from his own experience.
It is necessary to say something about the actual conditions and returns from the Buckinghamshire beech woods, which have been held up by some writers as an example of what may be done by following the system known as jardinage in France, which consists in thinning out the saleable trees every ten or twelve years and allowing natural seedlings to come up in their places.
During a visit of the Scottish Arboricultural Society on July 30, 1903, to this district, in which I took part, it was stated by one of the principal land agents in the district that £2 per acre was a common return over an average of years on woods managed on this system, which seems to have grown up during the last sixty years, partly through the legal disability of the owners to make clear fellings, and partly owing to the regular demand for clean beechwood of moderate size for chair-making. But what I saw myself led me to believe that though such a return may have been obtained for a short period on the best class of beech woods, it is not likely to continue, and that if an owner had a free hand and was not liable for waste, clear felling of the mature timber about once in 60–100 years would probably in the longrun be a better system. And this opinion was confirmed by Mr. George James, agent for the Hampden estate, who thinks that 15s. per acre, which is about the average rateable value of these woods, is as much as they are actually worth, and that when you get fine timber clean and well grown, as on Mr. Drake's estate at Amersham, many natural seedlings do not occur, but that on Earl Howe's estate at Dunn where, forty years ago, all or nearly all of the timber was cut, there is a good growth of young seedlings.
Professor Fisher of Cooper's Hill has written a very instructive article[1] on the Chiltern Hill beech woods, in which he states that these are probably the northern and western British limit of the indigenous beech forest, which was probably eradicated during the glacial period in the north of England; though remains found in the submarine forest-bed at Cromer, in Norfolk, prove that it existed before this period farther east. He quotes measurements taken by Mr. A.S. Hobart Hampden, now director of the Forest School at Dehra Dun, India, which show that on the average it takes ninety years in this district for beech to attain 3 feet in girth at breast height, and that a full crop of seed cannot be expected from trees much younger than eighty years when grown in dense order. He agrees with me that in many of the woods, including those which belong to Eton College, overthinning has been prevalent, and states that rabbits and brambles have in many cases prevented the natural regeneration from being as complete as it must be to keep such woods in profitable condition under the decennial selection system.[2] And as
