HOME TIMBER POOL

Hawera Star, Volume L, 4 March 1931, Page 10

HOME TIMBER POOL

NEED IN GREAT BRITAIN. FORESTRY PRESIDENT'S PROPOSAL. In iiis presidential address to the Edinburgh University Forestry Society in December, the Duxe of Montrose spoke of the need of a homegrown timber pool. What was wanted, he said, was some kind of co-opera-tive sawmill and timber yard to which landowners could consign their graded timeer of good class and where shipbuilders-, housebuilders, furniture makers and railway companies would be sure of finding the supplies they needed.

He thought it was a pity, the Duke said, that in the past landowners had not been able to get together on a co-operative footing in forestry. Jt was quite impossible for each estate working on its own to obtain a satisfactory market. They would have been in a sorry plight if their forefathers had not planted; and if they did not always plant on modern forestry lines, still, plant they did on lines that pleased themselves.

There was something very satisfying about planting a wood, although authorities told them it did not pay. During the 25 years he had lived on the Island of Arran they had planted stocks of 2,C00,G00 trees and lie hoped to ;see 5,000,000 planted. , Arran was the finest part of the British Isles for forestry—it was a common thing for Sitka spruce to put on a four-foot- top in a year, and he had seen a blue gum tree put on nine feet in a year in the open.