A Treatise on the Noble Art of Coppicing

Walking today: 3.7km

Coppicing, the practice of cutting trees down to the ground every 5 - 20 years and harvesting them like a crop, is a very old technique. Some coppiced trees in ancient woodlands are thought to be many hundreds of years old as the process of coppicing keeps the tree young and means that they never die of old age.

The greenwood that Robin Hood knew was most probably managed by coppicing, often using a system called "Coppice and Standard" where isolated high trees are left to grow to maturity to be cut down for constructional timber.

The most usual trees to be coppiced are hazel, oak, chestnut and ash on a cycle from 7 to 15 years depending on the variety and the products required. Most of the trees around the boundary of La Basse Cour hadn't had much attention for a long time before we arrived. We've used professional climbing tree surgeons to tackle the big jobs but everything else has been "fait maison". 

The before picture - the large hazel in the middle is the key tree on this part of the talus

About half way through the work, there are six main stems left at this stage

A cold day, a pile of brash and Barbara in a swiss hat

More of the top growth for eventual burning for ash

Nearly finished - just three main stems left and the "stool" has been cut back to ground level

22 rings so this was a new shoot in 1993 - we were all much younger then ;o)

Final view - exceptionally we left three large poles on this hazel for future harvesting

And Pip came along to help with the work - well sort of

In earlier times the wood would have been used for fuel and the poles burnt for charcoal (a critical ingredient in metal smelting and founding), bark would have been used for tanning animal skins and the finer top growth bundled into faggots to be used as winter fuel by the poorest people.

All the hazels and some of the chestnut, cherry and oak we have are being coppiced; the largest timber has gone to be cut into firewood, we've cut nearly a hundred poles for gardening and construction use, there's a huge bundle of pea sticks for the peas and the rest of the fine growth - brash - has been burnt and we'll use the ash (which is high in potash) in the compost heap and on the garden. We could be even more efficient if we had a high-capacity chipper (expensive) to shred all the finer growth and this could then be used for burning (if we had a special boiler - also expensive ...).

Trees are a carbon-neutral energy source (the carbon liberated in the burning process was originally fixed by the tree from the atmosphere), we probably don't have enough woodland to be fully self-sufficient in wood for energy but the timber we've cut down this week will not probably get burnt until the winter of 2017-8 and next winter we have more major work planned on the remaining mature trees that haven't been worked on so that wood should take us through to 2020. By which time we'll be ready to start harvesting some of the wood from the trees we've coppiced this winter - the symmetry of this whole cycle really attracts me