After having planted the young shade trees, then, there comes the question of providing shade for them, for without it their growth will be very slow, and the planter would have to wait a great many years before obtaining such an amount of shade as would have an effect in lowering the temperature of the plantation. He requires then some quick-growing tree as a nurse for the good caste shade trees, and the only tree I know of that is suitable for this purpose is the quick-growing charcoal tree (_Sponia Wightii_)--Kanarese, _gorkul mara_--which springs up with the first rain after the forest has been cleared and burnt. Planters, I am aware, have, generally speaking, a great objection to this tree, and it is considered by Mr. Graham Anderson (_vide_ his book previously quoted) as being "generally regarded as prejudicial and useless." This conclusion has probably arisen from the fact that it is certainly a bad thing to have a rapid grower, and therefore a greedy feeder on the land, and hence it has been found that the charcoal tree is bad when young. But when it has attained its full height, which in ordinary circumstances is about thirty feet (I have one specimen on my property about sixty feet high, the only one of such a size I ever saw), coffee thrives well under it. This I found to be the case on plantations on the slopes of the Nilgiri hills, where a very experienced planter told me that the tree was bad when young for coffee, but not so when old; and I there saw coffee thriving well under the shade of old charcoal trees. On my oldest plantation we only preserved one of the species (all the others having been cut down, as their good offices as nurses to better trees were no longer required), and the coffee always throve under it remarkably well. Where, too, the shade has subsequently become deficient we always plant charcoal as a nurse for the more desirable trees, and have never observed that it is injurious to coffee. On the whole, after a very long experience and observation of this tree, I have no hesitation in recommending it as a nurse to be thinly distributed amongst the newly-planted shade trees. It is, I may observe, too, a tree with very light branches, which, of course, can easily be removed without injury to the coffee, and its branches should be thinned away when they crowd the young shade trees, and when these have been sufficiently drawn up and expanded the charcoal tree should be entirely removed.