Unpopular Foresters
Recruits to the already excessive number of critics of the Forestry Commission have been multiplying in Wales ever since some 20,000 acres. including a number of farms, were selected for afforesting. I should not wish to throw a stone at that useful and skilful and hard working body, even if I lived in Carmarthen ; but there is one constructive detail in the chief critic's charges that seems to me admirable. The -Com- mission thinks so much, as is natural, in terms of forests that it is apt to forget the spinney. Trees are most useful, as is now realised in the prairie provinces of Canada, in Argentina and in South Africa, as a protection belt. Such belts, though planted chiefly for reasons of amenity—and how lovely they- are!—have been proved invaluable by country houses. They supplied a scarcely credible amount of timber during the war. Smaller local plantations would, of course, be more expensive and more trouble to manage than great square woods ; but it should be realised that they would do much more good and interfere much less with husbandry (which matters most) than the larger units. The belt is the ideal.
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