Remarks on the management, or rather, the mis-management of woods, plantations, and hedge-row timberWest, J.
Science
Remarks on the management, or rather, the mis-management of woods, plantations, and hedge-row timber
West, J.
Forests and forestry
If then the objection which would be made by the man of taste, to
the felling of Hedge-row and detached Timber, could be effectually
obviated, by providing a regular succession to take the place of such
as might be cut down—for the difference of a few yards in the _site_
need hardly be taken into the account—one great difficulty, at least,
would be overcome; and instead of wasting, as is done under the present
practice, a quantity of Timber, the aggregate value of which makes
it an object of _national_ importance, the growers might take down
their trees when they arrived at maturity, and thus produce a constant
supply of the best sort for home consumption: and it will not surely be
argued by the most determined advocate for free trade, that it would
be for the interest of the English Gentleman to give a higher price
for Foreign Pine than he would be able to make of home-grown Oak! No!
emphatically No!! When the navy requires it, by all means let it be so
appropriated, and if the demand be sufficient from that quarter, the
relative price will be kept up, but let not English heart of Oak be
reduced in our home market below the value of an inferior article,
with all the costs of transit added to the original price. This were
indeed to show a most extravagant and unaccountable preference of a
crotchet over the obvious dictates of reason, and the suggestions of
prudence. It would indeed be to drop the substance, and grasp at the
shadow.
I trust I may now conclude that I have satisfactorily proved,
not only that the “magnitude of the sacrifice which the present
practice involves is disproportionate to the good resulting,” but
that “the embellishment of a landscape does not necessarily include
the perpetuity of any one race of Trees.” In handling the remaining
proposition, and in endeavouring to prove that the present treatment of
Hedge-row Timber is “a perpetual offence against good taste,” I shall
at the same time, be accumulating evidence in support of the other two.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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