my oldest plantation we only preserved
one of the species (all the others having been cut down, as their good
offices as nurses to better trees were no longer required), and the coffee
always throve under it remarkably well. Where, too, the shade has
subsequently become deficient we always plant charcoal as a nurse for the
more desirable trees, and have never observed that it is injurious to
coffee. On the whole, after a very long experience and observation of this
tree, I have no hesitation in recommending it as a nurse to be thinly
distributed amongst the newly-planted shade trees. It is, I may observe,
too, a tree with very light branches, which, of course, can easily be
removed without injury to the coffee, and its branches should be thinned
away when they crowd the young shade trees, and when these have been
sufficiently drawn up and expanded the charcoal tree should be entirely
removed.

The subsequent treatment of the shade trees is of great importance. Their
lower branches in the early years of their growth are commonly thin and
weakly, and thus, of course, droop close over the coffee, and often touch
it. Then the inexperienced shade tree grower begins to lop off the lower
branches, with the result that he injures and bleeds the young tree, and
deprives it of the nutriment it would otherwise derive from its full
allowance of foliage. Some carry this trimming up to a very injurious
extent, and the result is that they grow young trees with long stems and
poor foliage, and a narrow spread of branches, and thus require many more
trees in the land than they would if they exercised a little more patience
at first. But if the tree is only left alone the evil of branches drooping
downwards on to the coffee will soon disappear, as these branches will not
only rise with the rising stem, but will thicken and grow upwards, instead
of drooping as they did when young and weakly. And some planters, I
observe, are by no means satisfied with lopping the lower boughs, but trim
off branches fifteen feet from the ground. Under such a system the number
of shade trees required is enormous, and the evils arising from the
number of boles with their vast mass of large roots will only be the more
severely apparent as time advances. By one shade planter in Coorg I have
been told that coffee there has already been suffering much from the
quantity of boles and tree roots in the land, in consequence of the
trimming up system and the quantity