high, the only one of such a size I ever saw), coffee thrives well under it.  This I found to be the case on plantations on the slopes of the Nilgiri hills, where a very experienced planter told me that the tree was bad when young for coffee, but not so when old; and I there saw coffee thriving well under the shade of old charcoal trees.  On 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 of trees required in consequence.  It should also be remembered that we require our shade not only to protect our coffee from the sun’s rays, but to shield it from those parching winds which sweep across the arid