Page:A primer of forestry, with illustrations of the principal forest trees of Western Australia.djvu/23

17 CHAPTER III.

THE FOREST.

The forest is a community and has a character of its own, just as each tree in it possesses its own individuality. It may be likened to a populous city. Every person in the city has many things in common with all the other individuals but he also has a character entirely his own. A forest holds many trees, perhaps nearly all of the same kind, but none the less the forest itself has a character that is not wholly shared by any other. A forest is more than a great collection of trees, since it includes not only the trees, but the soil and the undergrowth and natural features peculiar to itself. The trees bear the same relationship to each other as do the people in a town—they are mutually dependent and at the same time in competition with one another. Forests are primarily of two kinds, natural forests and planted forests. The one kind are those with which Nature has endowed the country possessing it, and the second are those which have been planted by man with the definite object of producing timber. Natural forests are of two kinds, cultivated and uncultivated. An uncultivated forest is one which has received no attention from man, except as a storehouse of timber to be cut down and carried away; the cultivated natural forest is one in which man has done something to repair the damage caused by the removal of timber or by fire or any other destructive agency. It will be shown later that a cultivated forest not only produces a very much larger crop of timber than an uncultivated one, but is to a large degree protected against loss from fire and other agencies disastrous to tree life.

The "cultivated" forest already referred to is the ideal of modern scientific forestry. In France, Belgium, and Germany the whole of the forests are cultivated, and in other European countries the process of converting "wild" or "uncultivated" forests to "cultivated" ones is proceeding apace. In Australia, with the exception of certain plantations, mainly of exotic trees, the forests are still uncultivated, but in every State the process of conversion is being pushed on. The effect of cultivation upon a natural forest is to increase very materially the amount of timber which the forest can yield annually without in any way diminishing its productive power. It has been stated by a high authority on forestry that "'four year of 'cultivated' forest growth equals a century of virgin forest growth." In South Africa, where scientific forestry methods have been in operation for a lengthened period, the results abundantly prove that care and attention bestowed on forests reap a rich reward. The following paragraph on the subject is taken from the writings of an eminent forester: —

"South Africa—Yields of 'wild' and 'cultivated' forests.—In South Africa, Eucalypt plantations, Hogsback, etc., worked at a rotation of 12 to 18 years, yielded 600 cubic feet per acre per year; the Nilgiris maximum, we have seen, was 700 cubic feet. This is about the quantity of timber obtained when all the mature material is worked, on an average acre of indiginous virgin forest at the Cape of Good Hope (Amatolas). We do not know how long it has taken to produce the stand of timber in the indigenous forest—not less than 100 years, perhaps 200. If Ave take the mature timber as half the gross yield, and these special Eucalypt yields as half average yields, that would show a yearly yield from the cultivated as about one-quarter the "stand" of timber in the wild forest; or, in other words, the cultivated forest makes in four years what the wild forest does in from 100 to 200 years!"