In the fatherland of forestry - Baron Alexander von Elverfeldt's forest management approach - World Forests

With a huge key, the Baron unlocked the heavy wooden door. The room in the tower was cool, dry, and dim, just as an archives should be. The thick stone walls had been built in the 17th century or that very purpose, and now hold metal shelves lined with acid free storage boxes. In them are parchments in crabbed 13th-century script documenting the construction of Castle Canstein, a meld of Celt and Saxon in central Germany. Also on the shelves are venerable leather-bound books and thick old newsprint, evoking earlier ages. Finally, the room contains an 1844 inventory of the estate's forests, now owned by Baron Alexander von Elverfeldt.

"Those same sites today produce 10 times more wood than they did in 1844," says the Baron, stooping to reach for something on a shelf. At 62, the Baron is slim and light on his feet, and it's easy to imagine courtly ancestors. He grins more readily than the average German, a trait he traces to the open, easy ways he learned during a year spent wandering through America in the 1950s. A brief stint working for the U.S. Forest Service in Oregon was one of many experiences that shaped Herr Baron's global perspective on forestry and propel his current involvement in international forestry.

His perspective is global, but his views are rooted in Germany, where the science of forestry was born. From 1983 to 1989, von Elverfeldt was president of the German Forestry Council, an umbrella organization of forestry groups. Recently he retired after nearly two decades as president of the private forest owner's organization in his state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The 1,440 gently rolling acres of woods around Castle Canstein exemplify many of the lessons learned from centuries of forest use and abuse in central Europe. Outside the tower, below stone ramparts still massive if disheveled with age, the smell of wild roses overpowers the past and makes the present immediate and sensuous. Beyond the waft of fragrance, past the tiny town of Canstein at the foot of the castle heights, the landscape rises and falls as if breathing.

"These lands were merely heath two centuries ago," the Baron says. "The legendary feeling that Germans have for the woods stems largely from the efforts to regrow their forests."

Today forests cover nearly a third of Germany. Almost half (46 percent) are owned by private individuals, the rest by states and municipalities, which seem to rank clean water and recreation as being as important as logs. Unlike the United States, the German federal government owns virtually no forestland; neither do timber companies.

Among private owners like the Baron, whose family bought Canstein in 1853, a continuity of ownership as yet unimaginable in America plus inheritance laws biased against division of land are an unchanging bedrock on which forest management is grounded.

Driving across his lands on narrow roads devoid of other traffic, von Elverfeldt slows to point out the tangible marks of time: here a prehistoric burial mound, there the remnants of agricultural terraces abandoned during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Both spots are surrounded by big trees, but differences in undergrowth and soil level are quite apparent. Prior land use with the attendant impacts on the soil are weighty factors in forest planning on the Baron's land. "I use the old inventories to find out what was planted where, and how well or poorly it did," Herr Baron says.

The past dissolves in the dappled sunlight of the here and now and a breeze that rustles through a grove of oaks and beeches. Here is today's version of the quintessential European forest: the ground strewn with ferns, the trunks thick, the canopy tossing and gleaming high overhead. Half of the Baron's woodlands are hardwoods, mostly beech and oak; the other half is composed of spruce, pine, and larch, with a small plantation of Douglas-fir. He generally manages for at least two tree species per stand, and the mix is important. "We leave young beech in the shadow of oaks to keep branches from growing," he says, "and we're letting beech grow among the shallow-rooted spruce to give them more stability against wind throw."

Natural regeneration is relied upon in many of the stands, sometimes with a little help. Beneath our feet, last winter's decaying leaves are churned by the unmistakable rooting of wild pigs. The Baron smiles. "They don't eat all the acorns, and they leave some turned under and well planted," he says. "In fact, a machine we use to plant acorns mimics the actions of pigs." Roe deer are more of a problem. Walking back to the car we climb over the kind of temporary fence, ubiquitous throughout German woodlands, that protects young trees from being nibbled to death.

Stacks of logs are piled neatly along the road, but there are few obvious signs of logging in the woods themselves. Clearcutting is generally scorned in Germany and prohibited in some parts of the country. Various methods of selective harvesting are preferred.