A practice of planting spruce in bunches, originally twelve to twenty plants in a bunch, had been in existence since 1780. This practice increased until 1850, and is still in use in the Harz mountains and in eastern Prussia, although the bunches have been reduced so as to contain only from three to five plants, the object of the bunching being to make sure that one or the other of the plants should live. Much discussion as to the merits of this method took place between the old masters, Cotta favoring the small bunches upon the basis of a successful plantation of his own, Hartig and Pfeil opposing it, but finally weakening. Since 1850, however, the practice of setting out single plants has become more general.
A reaction from the indiscriminate application of the shelterwood method to the hardwoods and of the clearing method to the pine set in during the last quarter of the 19th century under the lead of Burkhardt and Gayer. These advocated return to mixed forest and to natural regeneration with long periods, approaching a selection forest. Gayer especially, professor of silviculture at Munich, became the foremost apostle of this school. Yet even to this day, the principles of silvicultural treatment under the many different conditions remain unsettled. On the whole however, with the financial question assiduously brought forward, the clearing system has made most progress, and the selection system has nearly vanished, being replaced by the group method and the shelterwood system.
A number of special forms of silvicultural management applicable under special conditions have been locally developed, without, however, gaining much ground and being mainly of historical value. Among these may be mentioned Seebach’s Modified Beech Forest, which consists in opening up a beech stand so as to secure regeneration, merely to form a soil cover, leaving enough of the old stand on the ground to close up in thirty or forty years. By this treatment the large increment due to open position is secured without endangering the soil. Similarly the Storied or Two-aged High forest, was applied to the management of oak forest in mixture with beech. In a few localities also, on limited areas, a combination of forest and farming (Waldfeldbau) has been continued and elaborated, besides the more general use of coppice and coppice with standards.
According to the statistics for 1900 the following distribution of the acreage under different silvicultural methods prevailed throughout the empire:
| Deciduous Per cent. | Coniferous Per cent. | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Forest | 32. | 5 | 67. | 5 |
| High Forest | 18. | 4 | 60. | 1 |
| Selection Forest | 2. | 3 | 7. | 4 |
| Coppice | 6. | 8 | — | |
| Coppice with standards | 5. | — | ||
Coniferous forest, of which 68% is pine and 30% spruce, prevails in Eastern and Middle Germany, deciduous forest, of which 20% is oak, the balance principally beech, in the West and South.
Coppice and coppice with standards are mostly in private hands as well as the coniferous selection forest, the State forests being almost entirely high forest, i.e., seed forest, other than under selection method.
Methods of Improving the Crop. The credit of having first systematically formulated the practice of thinnings under the name of Durchforstung (for the first thinning), Durchplenterung (for the later thinnings), belongs to Hartig, although the practice of such thinnings had been known and applied here and there before his time. He confined himself mainly to the removal of the undesirable species, dead and dying, suppressed and damaged trees, being especially emphatic in his advice not to interrupt the crown cover. Excepting the early weeding or improvement cuttings, these thinnings were not to begin until the fiftieth to seventieth year in the broadleaved forest, but in conifers in the twentieth to thirtieth year.