Page:The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln Volume 2.pdf/458

Rh arboriculture has been kept. In a large number of years, such as 1793, 1795, 1797, 1808, 1816, and 1821–3, the numbers planted exceeded half a million. During the present century the yearly average has been 246,080.

At the exhibition of the Royal Agricultural Society at Park Royal in June, 1905, the astonishing total of 157 specimens of different timbers grown on the Earl of Yarborough's Lincolnshire property was shown. This included every variety of indigenous tree, together with a great number of foreign trees, such as the Japanese Juniper and Cypress, the Swiss Stone Pine, the Californian Redwood, the Carolina Poplar and the Venetian Sumach.

Most of the woodlands on Lord Yarborough's property were evidently planted with the idea of producing landscape effects on what must have been bare wolds. The timber has been at its best for some years past; it is therefore now being taken down and replanted so much every year, in order to get it into a rotation of about 90 or 100 years growth. There is no coppice or underwood work on these estates, and but little in any part of Lincolnshire.

There has been a creosote plant in use at Brocklesby for the last few years, which enables a great deal of timber, which would make very little money if sold, to be used for fencing on the estate. An interesting table of the result of tests, showing the absorption of creosote oil by various kinds of timber,—such as posts of Scotch spruce and silver fir, larch, and hornbeam, as well as rails of spruce and larch and hunting gates of oak and larch hurdles—was presented last year with examples to the Royal Agricultural Society. The timber is naturally dried, and the oil subjected to a pressure of seventy to eighty lb. per inch for three or four hours.

The official agricultural returns show how steady has been the growth of arboriculture in this county during the last quarter of a century. In 1891 the woods of Lincolnshire, excepting recent plantations, covered 39,490 acres; the plantations of the last ten years occupied 1,342 acres, giving the total for 1891 of 40,832. In 1895 the woods, excepting young plantations, covered 41,425 acres; the plantations since 1881 had an area of 1,702 acres, bringing up the full total to 43,127. A return of the woodlands was again made in 1905 on a better plan. Lincolnshire is entered as having 4,779 acres of coppice; 2,154 of plantations, and 37,242 of other woods, yielding a total of 44,174 acres, or an increase of 1,000 acres in the last decade.