Some of the specialists have been urging the virtues of
a .Canadian poplar that grows at a speed which is the despair Cs-en of the annual hawkWeed. It is doubtless a more solid pleasure to watch your trees growing rapidly into favour. I ,know nothing more completely satisfying than to walk through a plantation in autumn with a yard measure and to i.record that the trees are four or five or six feet higher than ,they were in the spring. You feet that the six months have been profitably spent indeed, you 'have altered the landscape, and moreover you have provided the' nation with a form of property that it greatly lacks. Nevertheless it is a considerable 'surrender to grow a very indifferent wood when it is ideally I:passible to -grow a very valuable wood. The poplars arc the tleast valuable sort of timber. Why is it that afforesters are ,often discouraged by the experts from growing cricket-bat ? It is a rapid grower. It will flourish in many sorts
of places, even in moderately dry soil, and may give very solid returns within the short space, as foresters reckon, of a dozen years. There are a thousand places where Sails eaerulea atba may be profitably planted. Yet when all is said I believe that the basis of afforestation on the soils where conifers do not flourish should be those good old native English standbys, ash and sycamore. Both arc valuable and likely to grow in value. The world has taken the big circle, and is back behind the stone age in the wood age, for wood is now transmutable into gold by all sorts of processes.
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