THE HAGLEY PARK OAKS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VI, Issue 1643, 21 May 1919, Page 10

THE HAGLEY PARK OAKS.

CONDITIONS UNFAVOURABLE TO GROWTH. Some discussion has taken place, lately in the newspapers regarding the sickly condition of some of the oaks in Hagley Park, and several reasons have been put forward to account for it. From the article published below, which has been reprinted from the "Garden" magazine, it would appear pretty obvious that the failure of the daks to do well in the park is due j to the conditions under which they are growing. The writer is Sir Herbert Maxwell, a high authority on forestry. Trees of nearly every kind, writes Sir Herbert Maxwell, are creatures of close company, crowding the ground they occupy in serried ranks and dense masses, and screening it from sun and wind with a close canopy of foliage. Light being their primary requirement, they direct their growth towards it. An isolated tree, with light all round'and above it, acquires the contour of a cabbage; but Nature provides against that by insisting that trees shall not grow isolated, but iu severe competition for light. In natural forests, light can only be obtained from above, wherefore trees j grow upwards, producing lofty clean , boles with small heads. More than one English landowner have consulted me about the condition of their oak woods. I will cite two or three instances. The first was in what had been about 50 acres of pure oak forest, ISO to 200 vears old, the trees averaging 100 ft high with 40ft, 50ft, and 60ft of clean boles. I think I have only seen one oak forest to equal what this must have been before it was ruined, and that is at Cour Chevernay on the, Loire, not far from Blois. There must have been not less than 0000 cubic feet or 10,000 cubic feet of splendid timber on every acre of this English wood, which, at 2/- a foot, represents a value on the 50 acres of £50,000. (I base this estimate on the price paid for an oak which had been felled shortly before my visit. It contained about 200 cubic feet of timber, and was sold for £20.) No doubt my friend's neighbours would have blamed him had he reaped this glorious crop (for it was the glory of the countryside), so inveterate has become our habit of treating woodland as a luxury and a playground. Yet I have the hardihood to pronounce it folly not to have turned this timber to account; for see what came to pass. My friend, who had all the amateur passion for woodland which so many English country gentlemen display, had set to work, about 20 years before my visit, to improve the landscape by cutting glades through this forest and thinning the whole of it severely. The result was what is inevitable when oak high-wood is suddenly thrown into open ! order. Nearly every tree left standing had gone stag-headed and thrown out an eruption of "rain spray"—crowded twigs along the stem and limbs. The grove had been irremediably ruined. The process of degeneration had started upon these noble trees; they would get more and more stag-headed; the branches would shorten, until each oak assumed the stunted, misshapen aspect of the melancholy wrecks in Sherwood and Cadzow Forests. There was no remedy; the only course to be taken was to fell the whole wood and replant. In the second case referred to, some fine oaks were suffering in a similar, way from even more drastic treatment. Here the forester explained to me that'' staghead" was the result of the roots getting down to "something- they didn't , like." Needless to say that this had nothing to do with the mischief. Neither oaks nor any other tree known to science drive their roots deeper than suffices for a firm hold of the ground. They draw nourishment from the upper layers of soil, especially from the characteristic "forest soil" formed of the annual leaf-fall, which accumulates undisturbed under close canopy. In this instance an attempt had been made to throw an old wood into park, leaving a few oaks at wide, wind-swept intervals where no leaf-fall could rest and rot — no forest soil accumulate. The trees were simply wasting away from hunger and thirst, their roots having been suddenly exposed to evaporation and radiation. The third instance I will cite is also, like the other two, from the English Midlands. I spent two instructive days perambulating this well-wooded demesne in company with the head forester, a man not only thoroughly well versed in the technical part of his craft, but also exceptionally far-sighted in his views of forest management. Never have I met one in his position with sounder views about the treatment of high-wood with underplanting. He showed me how, in some woods, splendid oaks were going back in consequence of injudicious thinning, and how, in others, oaks of equal age—lso to 250 years—had maintained their full vigour through being mixed or underplanted with beech. I could not but congratulate my'friend upon having such a capable man iu charge of his extensive woodlands. What, therefore, was my

chagrin wjien I learnt about a year later that this forester had been discharged. When I asked his employer what was the reason, he replied: "The fellow would not let me do what I liked with my own woods."