The woodlands ...

Front matter

I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

I UNITED STATES OF AMERICA*

^ ^^ ^^ ^ -^^^ ^ ^^ 3^

Dedication

TO

WILLIAM BUDD, Esq.

CLERK OF THE PEACE FOR THE COUNTY OF BERKS.

Preface

1 . It will be unnecessary for me to say^ here, any thing about the manner, in which the divers parts of this work will be arranged, seeing that that has been so fully described in the title of the work itself. Nor need I say any thing about the profit attending the planting of trees ; because, occasions enough will, hereafter, offer for the doing of that ; and, besides, the profit depends upon the judicious application of the means which the planter may possess. I shall, therefore, here confine myself to a few remarks, on what appears to me to be the defects in all the works of this kind which I have ever seen. They all leave something, and something of import mce too, untold to us. They begin in the middle of the subject very frequently, and end, as frequently, somewhere about where they ought to begin. Many years ago, I wished to know, whether I could raise Birch trees from the seed, I looked into two French books and into two English ones, without being able to learn a word about the matter. I then looked into the great book of knowledge, the Encyclopedia Bri- TANNiCA : there I found, in the general dictionary, " Birch Tree, see Betula : Botany Index." I

PREFACE.

hastened to Bet u la, with great eagerness ; and there I found, Betula, see Birch Tree." That was all; and this was pretty encouragement to one who wanted to get, from books, knowledge about the propagating and the rearing of trees.

2. Some writers give you the mere botany of the tree; others its qualities as timber ; others tell you what ground it delights in ; others treat of the act of planting ; others of pruning and cultivation; but no book that I ever yet saw told me every thing that I ought to know, from the gathering of the seed, to the rearing up and the cutting down of the tree.

3. This is what I shall endcavovu' to do for my readers in the comse of this work ; and, as I proceed, I shall, I trust, take care, in all cases where it may be found necessary, to give the reasons for doing that which I advise to be done. Rules, w^ithout reasons, have not a thousandth part of the weight which they have when accompanied with reasons. They savour of arbitrary commands, and are seldom received with any great degree of docility or attention.

4. I shall begin by giving instructions for prej)aring the ground; for planting; and for culti' vating after planting. These instructions are ap* plicable to trees of all sorts ; and, therefore, they

PREFACE.

will properly precede the instructions relative to particular trees. After this will come the trees in alphabetical order ; describing, under the head of each tree, the several things mentioned in the title of the work; so that, the attentive and diligent reader will, when he sees a seed upon a tree, know what to do with that seed, so that it may, in due time, become a tree.

5. The inducements to create property by tree-planting are so many and so powerful, that, to the greater part of those who possess the means, little, I hope, need be said to urge them to the employing of those means. Occasions enough will offer for showing how quicMij the profits come. But, still there are some persons, who possess such means, who are well assured of the ultimate gain, but who are, nevertheless, discouraged by the thought that they shall not live to see the actual pecuniary product of their undertaking, and who, according to the idea of that dismal moralist, Dr. Johnson, begin to think of dying when they are exhorted to plant a tree. Let all such attend to the lesson given them in La Fontaine's beautiful Fable of the ^' Old Man and the Three Young Men," the Avise, the generous, the noble sentiments of which ought to be implanted in every human breast.

Un octogenaire plantoit.

PREFACE.

6. To translate tins is like an attempt to make a thing to resemble the Rainbow ; and, therefore, I beg- those who may happen not to understand French, to be pleased to receive, from my pen, the following statement of the mere prosaic meaning of these words of this absolutely inimitable writer^,

PREFACE.

who, in marks of simplicity the most pleasing that ever followed the movements of a pen, has, on numerous subjects, left, to ages unborn, philosophy the most profound and sentiments the most just and exalted.

A MAN OF FOURSCORE was planting trees. To *' build might pass; but, to plant at such an age 1" exclaimed three young men of the neighbourhood. *' Surely/' said they, "you are doaling ; " for, in God's name, what reward can you receive ** for this, unless you were to live as long as one " of the Patriarchs ? Wliat good can there be in *' loading yuui life with cares about a time which ** you are destined never to see ? Pray devote the *' rest of your life to thoughts on your past errors ; ** give up distant and grand expectations : these become only us young men." — " They become " not even you," answered the Old Man. All ** we do comes late, and is quickly gone. The pale ** hand of fate sports equally with your days and •* with mine. The shortness of our lives puts us all on a level. Who can say which of us shall last behold the light of heaven ? Can any moment of your lives secure you even a second "moment? My great grand-children will owe *' shady groves to me : And, do you blame me for " providing delight for others ! Why, the thought of this is, of itself, a reward which 1 already " enjoy ; I may enjoy it to-morrow, and for some ** days after that; nay, 1 may more than once " even see the sun rise on your graves." The Old Man was right : one of the three, ambitious to see the New World, was drowned in the port; another, pursuing fame in the service of Mars, was suddenly stopped by an unexpected shot ; the third fell from a tree, on which he himself was putting a giafF : and the Old Man, lamenting their sad end, engraved on their tomb the story here related.

PREFACE.

7. I do not pretend, that, in publishing this work, I am actuated soldtj by a desire to promote public and private utility. There is the gratification of my own taste, the indulgence of my o^vn delight in talking about trees ; and there are, besides, the more ordinary motives of fame and profit : but, I think I do myself no more than justice, in saying, tliat the work must necessarily have a tendency to produce good, both public and private ; while it will always be a singular satisfaction to me to refiect, that it may tend to induce, here and there, a father of a family to point out to his sons and daughters, that it is more honourable, and attended with more happinc^ s, to be provided with competent and secure fortunes by the sowing and the planting of trees, than by endeavouring to succeed in attaining that object after the manner of the base Jews and Jobbers, who win their half-millions by *' watching ^' the turn of the market."

8. I shall, throughout the work, number the para- [graphs, and not tJie pages ; the former being much the most convenient for purposes of reference : and, at the close, I shall give an Index, referring to the several matters which the work contains.

^\M. COBBEIT,

Kensinglon, \st December, 182').

THE WOODLANDS:

OR,

A TREATISE, &:c.

GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS, RELATIVE TO TRE E . PL AN TI N G.

Of the. sorts of ground, in lohich to plant Timber Trees and Underwood.

Of the method of preparinfj the ground for planting, and of the expense.

Of fencing the ground.

Of the times of the gear, and of the weather, for planting.

Of the age and size of the Plants, and of preparing their roots for planting.

Of the method of performing the work of planting.

OF THE SORTS OF GROUND.

9. Under tho name of each sort of tree will be mentioned the sort of ground in which it ought to be phuited, or in which it may be pUmtcd with a fair chance of success. I sliall, therefore, here, merely describe the sorts of ground that we commonly find in England. 1. A black mould with a brown mould under it, and then, at a pretty g^ood depth, sand, or gravel, or brick-earth, or clay, or a stone of some sort, 2. A reddish loose loam, with stone of some

General Instructions.

sort beneath it. 3. A brown loose loam, with gravel, sand, brick-earth, or clay or stone beneath. 4. A stiff and reddish loam, with large flints (yellow outside and whitish inside) amongst it, and with chalk, at various depths, beneath. 5. A loose grey earth, fall of flints (grey outside and bkie inside) on a bed of chalk, not far distant. 6. A marley top soil with chalk beneath. 7. A marley soil with grey, or white, stone beneath. 8. A stiff" loam with clay beneath, and not far from it. 9. A loose sandy loam with brick-earth beneath. 10. A loose sandy loam with clear white sand to a great depth beneath. 11. A very light reddish sandy loam with red sand, or sand-stone, beneath. 12. A black-grey shandy loam, with sand or sand-stone not far beneath. 13. A stiff loam, mixed with small gravel at top, and with clay beneath. 14. A loose grey soil, mixed with pebbles, at top, and a bed of gravel beneath. 15. Boggy ground. 16. Stift' groimd with water not far beneath. 17. Water-sides.

10. There are several other sorts of ground ; so great is, indeed, the variety, that it would require a volume, much larger than this will be, barely to give any thing api)roaching towards a full and accurate description of each. Here is, however, enough for any practical purpose ; for, the difference between any cue of the above-mentioned soils and any other, approaching in nature towards it, is not, as to its capacity for bearing trees, so great as to make the remarks, applicable to the former, inapplicable to the latter.

PREPARING THE GROUND FOR PLANTING.

11. How many millions have been thrown aicay in planting ! How many thousands of plantations have, at the end of twenty or fifty years, made a beggarly exhibition ;

Preparing the Ground.

and how many of them have wholly failed ! Yet, no truth is more evident to my mind than this ; that no plantation ever failed, except from the manifest error of the proprietor. It is woise than useless to plant, unless you do the whole thing well ; because, instead of creating a source of profit and of pleasure, you create a source of loss and of mortification. Planters but too often have, when they are about to plant, the word economy on their lips; and, they do not treat that word fairly; for, it really means nothing more than management, whereas they will have it mean sparing in expense: and, then, they abuse it still further by making it mean positive sparing : so that, at last, they come to the conclusion, that that is the wisest plan which costs the least sum to the acre, without any regard to the sorts of trees or to the manner of planting them.

!2. This is, at first sight, very strange ; for, when a man is about to sow corn, or plant cabbages, he thinks of the produce, as well as of the cost of sowing and planting; and, he expects a crop proportioned to his expense of seed, manure and tillage. But, it would seem, if one were to judge from the manner in which planting is generally executed, that tree - planters care nothing at all about the result; that they think, that, to plant is to plant, as to die is io die; that the manner is of very little consequence; and that, therefore, the less the plantation cost, the better. It is very well known, that, to spare manure and tillage, in the cultivation of corn, is the sure way to lose money. It is very well known, that it is better not to sow coin at all, than to do it badly. And yet men in general, seem wholly to forget this when they are planting trees. The chief cause of this strange way of thinking is, that the returns, from corn^sowing, are near at

General Instructions.

haiul, and that those from tree-planthig are distant ; but, though the actual pecuniary receipts from tree-planting may be distant; and, though they were (which is not the case) always very distant; still the returns, as to increase of value of property, are not more distant, and, indeed, not so distant, as those from the sowing of corn 5 for, the moment your trees are in the ground, your land is increased in value ; and, were it to be sold, would sell, in porportion to the worth of the plantation, for more than it would have sold before. If the trees have had a year or two of growth, that growth makes a further addition to the value of the land ) and so on for every year, until the trees be fit for cutting down. If, indeed, it be immediate annual income that you want; if you cannot afford to wait for the effects of planting, that is a very good reason for not planting at all; but it is no reason for planting in what is called a cheap manner.

13. There is another cause for this cheap planting, which is the more difficult to counteract as it arises out of a feeling which is almost natural to the heart of man ; namely, a desire to possess a great extent of plantation. Men in general like to talk, aye, and even to tJwik, of the number of acres which they have of land, or of any thing growing on land. Nevertheless, as it is perfectly notorious, that it is better to have one acre cf good crop of wheat, than a hundred acres of crop which does little more than equal the amount of the seed, why may not one acre of good plantation be worth more than a hundred of bad plantation ? 1 have seen more than a hundred acres, which was planted about twenty-five years before I saw it, planted with firs, birch, and other such things, costing, in trees and planting, about 3/. 10.^. an acre. So that, besides the fencing (an expensive thing), here was the sum of 350/. There had been no actual receipts from it ; and the trees, if cut down and sold, would

Preparing the Ground.

hardly have fetched an amount equal to the expenditure and the interest, reckoning not a fiirtliing for the rent of the land. There were, in this tract, ahout seven acres of pretty good land in two little dells. Now, if the owner had phuited these with ash, or with chesnut (not to mention locust) at an expense of 12/. an acre, the seven acres would, at the time when I saw the plantation, have yielded him two cuttings, worth 15/. an acre the first cutting, and 25/. an acre the second. So that here woukl, in the space of twenty-five years, have been (exclusive of fencing) an expenditure of 84/., and a receipt of 280/. And, observe, that, in this case, the stools, or stems, would still be ready to go on producing similar crops, once in ten years, for ages. But, then, alas ! the owner would have possessed nothing but a bleak heath, with a couple of little coppices in its dells, instead of being the lord of a " hundred acres of woods" !

14. The first thing to be done, in the making of a plantation, is to trench the ground to two feet deep at the least. I shall first describe the work of trenching, and afterwards give my reasons for the performing of it. You begin by marking out with a line, two feet wide, on one side or end, of your piece of ground. You strain your line across the piece of ground, two feet from the outside of the piece. Then the workmen chop with their spades along against the line. Then, they measure another two feet, and chop along again. When they have thus marked out a few trenches, they begin digging out the first trench, the earth of which, to the depth of two feet, they wheel away to the other end of the piece, to be ready there to fill up the last trench with. I am here supposing the ])iece of ground to be so small as for the wheeling of the earth not to be distant, and as to cause no inconvenience in taking the

General Instructions.

whole width at one trench. But, if the piece of ground hf large, it will not be worth while to carry the earth of the first trench away. It may be disposed of by throwing it back, over the ground about to be trenched.

15. Let us suppose a piece of ground containing an acre, and, the rules for trenching such a piece will apply to a piece of any extent. It would, in such a case, even if tlie outsides were all straight lines, be inconvenient to open at once, so long a trench as would reach from one side to the other. The trench might be in length proportioned to the number of workmen, allowing about half a rod to each, so as not to crowd them too much. Suppose the piece of ground to be 13 rod, or perch, long, and 12 rod wide, which piece will then contain one acre all but 4 ^zrod. Let us suppose the sides to be straight, and that four men are to trench this piece of ground.

16. First mark out the piece into lifts ; that is to say, into strips of the width that the men are to trench at a time. They are called lifts, because men are said to carry so much ground, or space, in their works of the field or garden. A mower, who takes a wide swarth, is said to carry more ground than he who takes a narrow one. Any width of ground that is dug, or hoed, at once going along, leaving the rest of the fiehl to be worked on in like manner, is, therefore, called a lift; and it is necessary to bear the word in mind. There must be some word to designate the thing, and this is as good as any other.

17. The supposed piece of ground is 12 rod wide and 13 long. Doing the work longwise there will be 6 lifts each of 2 rod wide ; and this piece, marked out into lifts, let us suppose to be represented by the following lines, which are as well placed as the thing can be done by mere printing materials.

rt

F.

G.

K.

L.

P.

b c w

D.

E.

H.