SAND DUNES.

Digger (Invercargill RSA), Issue 42, 7 January 1921, Page 4

SAND DUNES.

' INFORMATION FOR NEW ZEALANDERS. The treatment of sand dunes in France, where tens of thousands of acres of waste land have been made profitable, is the sub. ject of a pamphlet that has been issued by the Government Printing Office. The work is a translation of a report by a French expert, M. Edouard Harle. The success of the work in Gascony has been the result of operations which were commenced in 1787, and which were continued over many years. The result has been the afforestration in valuable resinous and timber-producing pines of thousands of acres of sandy wast.es, the financial yield to the State being very consider. able. The trees, in turn, have prevented the encroachment of the windblown sand%, and have afforded protection for extensive cultivation. It seems from accounts given by the French writer that in the early stages of the work long lines of palisading, on a particular systgm, were erected on the seaward side of the duneg. As these collected the sands they wer,e raised again and again. The result has been large protecting seaward dunes which now fringe the littoral. The sowing of the flats and dunes was with approved quantities of pine seed, broom seed? and marram-grass seed, the last-mentioned being added when the dune9 were very unstable and exposed. The seeds were spread separately and quite uniformly, and wero immediately covered over with brushwood to prevent them being blown together, or scattered, by the wind. The pine used was the maritime pine (pinus pinaster), and the broom the brush broom (sarothamnus scoparius), Gorse seed -^as often added. The pine in its first gro'wth was protected by the other plants. Much importance was attached to the quantities used and the methods of sowing. The seed was immediately covered with boughs trimmed fanwise, "like the branchletg of trees on opposite branches." To this end all twigs above or below, which would prevent the branches lying quite flat on the soil, had to be cut off. It was of the utmost importance that the branches should ■ lie flat on the gronnd to prevent the wind lifting them, and they were to be placed across the track of prevailing winds as offering a better protection to the young plants. When necessary a few shovels of sand were thrown on to weight them down.