![]() ![]() A twelve year rotation will also produce firewood. The rods, which can run straight to four metres, are either split and used for hurdle making and building materials or, in my case, for plant supports in the kitchen garden. The finer top growth is used for pea sticks, faggots and withies. Later cuts between January and March produce wood that is prone to brittleness. The best material from coppicing, which retains its pliability, is cut at the beginning of the winter. Ephemeral woodlanders such as foxgloves seize this window of opportunity and bluebells, wood anemone and primroses take the chance to build up their strength before being cast once again into more permanent shade. Cut on an eight to twelve year rotation, a hazel coppice will regenerate fast, the trees touching again in four or five years, but not before a valuable interlude of light has been allowed to reach the woodland floor. Hazels light up the local hedges in FebruaryĬoppicing extends the life of a tree and the industry around it traces our woodland symbiosis in a long and unbroken line of charcoal production as well as material for hurdles, furniture and building. New trees that have been deliberately layered (that is, rooted by bending the longest shoots to the ground and weighting them with a stone) stand at a sensible distance of about eight strides to give them room enough, but still with the company they need to draw new growth up and straight towards the light.Īn old coppiced hazel on the banks of the ditch with the old flail line visible at fence post height The original stumps have rotted away from the middle, but you can see the oldest plants in the coppice mapped in the close groupings of offsets that have radiated outward over time. Where I come from on the South Downs, the ancient coppices contain trees that are thought to be as much as a thousand years old. Although you can see the previous brutal regime in their eldest limbs, they have shot from the base as hazels do and, in just eight years, we have the beginnings of a new grove. ![]() By disentangling the wire from the bushes that had been habitually scalped by the flail and then kept in check by the cattle, a number have been freed and left to regenerate. Further up the hill again, where some of the hedges along the ditch were nothing more than a twist of barbed wire and bramble, it is often the hazel that has outlived its neighbours. It is impossible to tell the age of the hazels that sit in the hedge, for they will take a regular cut and regenerate as a shrub rather than a tree, but they are probably as old as their cousins in the wood. Nuts that were buried by squirrels and forgotten, but happy to be part of the hedgerow and its community. Walk the line of the hedges up the slope away from the wood and you find hazel here too. Snowdrops planted beneath one of the old hazels Old coppiced hazels have fallen across the brook at the bottom of the far slopes One of the old regenerated hazels by the brook edge ![]() Huddled on the edge of the wood where it is still and moist and sheltered. The billowing outline of one tree running into another reveals their true character and shows you where they thrive. At the edges of the wood and where they step out from the high canopy and finger up the brook in the open crease at the bottom of the slopes, they look most contented. Happy to live in the understory of the tall poplars above them, their rangy limbs topple like collapsed scaffolding where they have gone without coppicing, but you can read their preference for the hinterland. Look down now on the wood from our perch on the hillside and the pale golden cast of the catkins reveal where the hazels run. The pools of catkin and snowdrop have made new places that we are drawn to explore when the winter is with us. In their shadow I have been planting snowdrops, which like the moisture there in the winter and the drier influence of their roots in the summer. ![]() Their domain, very sensibly, was over the water and into the shade, but it is remarkable how quickly a change of regime is marked in growth and, in the eight years without the cattle, their limbs have reached back over our land so that that you now have to duck as you approach. They cling to the banks of the brook opposite our neighbour’s wood and were protected by a run of barbed wire that kept the cattle from the brook’s edge and, in turn, provided the trees with their own little sanctuary. We have half a dozen mature hazels ( Corylus avellana) that survived here for being out of reach of the grazing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |