Today’s Green Gym session was hazel coppicing at the Outwoods. Hazel is a vigorous tree that responds positively to pruning. In fact, you can chop an established plant down to almost nothing and it will respond by growing back. Better yet, the growth tends to be multiple long, straight branches. At some point in the distant past, this was noted and the practises of coppicing and pollarding were developed to farm the plant for material as well as keeping it from becoming too large and unstable or swamping other trees.
Pollarding, which we are going to experiment with on a tree in our back garden, involves encouraging from a point round about waist to chest height. That has the advantage of an open under-storey and also not involving too much bending to maintain. Coppicing just takes the whole plant back to the ground and lets it regrow from there.
Actually, it isn’t quite level with the ground. That would probably work but there is a risk the plant would get swamped and it would also grow back unpredictably. The method we were using was to aim to trim the branches back to form a low bowl with every cut angled. The ones round the outside will be about 1-2cm above the ground at the lowest point and the central ones will be a little higher, although it depends on the diameter. That prevents water settling on the exposed ends and starts the new growth gently fanning out in all directions. In a year or two, it will form a small shrub and sometime over the next five or six years it will ideally be harvested again with the amount of time influencing what the resulting sticks are best suited to – perhaps three or four years for weaving into structures or six or seven years to created quite robust frameworks.