of vigour, I should prefer them, though I would not plant Scots pine as a forest tree on any soil where I could get larch to grow even fairly well; and on dry chalk and limestone soils it never grows with the vigour that it does on sandy soils.
Large parts of the open heath of the New Forest, though constantly pastured by horses, are becoming overgrown with Scots pine to such an extent that if they escape fire it seems as though they would eventually turn those open wastes into a more or less dense pine wood.[1] But on clay soils, and wherever a rank growth of grass, ferns, or briars is found, natural reproduction is comparatively rare, and over the whole of the Cotswold Hills I only know of a few places where self-sown pines can be seen.
If natural reproduction is desired, the best way of encouraging it is to uncover lines or patches of soil in the winter, on which the seed falling in April can germinate; but the growth of these self-sown plants is, as usual with almost all natural seedlings, at first much slower than that of planted trees. In very old pine woods of 100 to 150 years' growth, such as are found in Strathspey and in a few parts of England, the accumulated carpet of dead pine needles seems to prevent the young seedlings from establishing themselves; and in the Belvidere plantation at Windsor Park, which is one of the finest in England, I saw no self-sown seedlings under the fine old trees, many of which are 100 feet and more in height.
In such cases it is best to burn the heather or to graze it closely with sheep and cattle, and in many cases this is a necessary preliminary to preparing the ground for natural reproduction in Scots pine woods; but if the soil produces grass rather than heather, the regeneration is always less successful and requires more assistance,
I shall not attempt to give any estimate of the financial results of planting Scots pine as an unmixed plantation, because the conditions of soil and climate are so varied that any estimates, such as we see commonly given in books on forestry, are usually misleading. On very sandy, dry soil it will probably pay as well or better than any other tree, because it can be planted so cheaply, and will regenerate itself so easily.[2] But it must be kept thick enough to clean its stem before the branches get large, and in fact it may be better not to thin at all until 20 to 30 years old, when the weaker stems which will hardly pay to cut and carry out will be killed by their stronger neighbours. On high moorlands also it may be, and now often is, as profitable a crop as larch, because it grows well in windy and exposed situations; but I would not plant it, except as a nurse to other trees, on any soil where experience has shown that a more valuable tree will grow to fair timber size, and the plan often adopted of mixing it in larch plantations on calcareous soil has led in many places to absolute failure.
With regard to the possible yield of Scots pine in England, I have heard of nothing better than a part of the Dipton Woods near Hexham, Northumberland, the property of Lord Allendale. This was described in Trans. Scott. Arb. Soc. xx.
