NATIVE TREE GENERATION

Hokitika Guardian, 7 June 1930, Page 3

NATIVE TREE GENERATION

Important testimony in support cf the cause of indigenous timber conservation and culture comes from the Westland district. A variety, of our New Zealand beech Inis regenerated it,'-■('lf on a large area of tailings in an old mining region and has produced its second crop of usable timber in forty years. This beech is the kind hotaideally described as Nbthofagus fusca, and popularly known a,s hh! beech—often miscalled birch. It grows into a massive tree from sixty to a hundred feet high, with a trunk from three feet .to six feet in diameter. It is a good strong timber, and the State Forest Service experts say that it can quite well be . substituted in large part for imported eucalyptus timber. The timber in the young btisli mentioned is now being cut and sold for pit props in the mines, for which it is well suited, It would be more useful still, for a variety of purposes, including furniture making, if it were left for another twenty or thirty years, but tlie fact that it. grows so quickly into marketable timber is proof that it would pay well to grow it in preference to so much exotic pine and larch and other foreign trees. Well-grown Northofagus fusca is now very largely used for bridge building. This evidence concerning the red hooch should reinforce the case for the systematic regeneration of numerous other good New .Zealand timbers, especially tiie rimei a:ul tile kn hiknt.cn The latter tree, as has more !hail ome been nointed out in those columns, grows at a comparatively fast rate; fine young ■ groves of it are to he seen in many places in the Auckland district, wherever it Ims neon fenced in from stock

—J.C. in Auckland “Star.”