February - the coppicing season concludes
Written for and originally published by Homes & Gardens
It’s that time of year where our workshop and our woodland begin to meet again. As the ground firms up but before bluebells and orchids show their tips, we extract the timber we’ve cut over the winter and take it back to London to machine and dry it ready for furniture.
This year has been a good haul; hornbeam, hazel, birch, chestnut and ash, all no older than 18 years, cut close to the ground from ‘stools’, or root systems, that have been throwing up strong, straight, workable young branches for woodmen like me for centuries. This is known as coppicing.
Our five acre ancient woodland in Kent is divided by two banks with adjacent ditches and hornbeam pollards which indicate this remarkable cycle has happened here since Norman times, and I’m determined that will continue, even though the work is hard.
With shoulders aching from carrying the wood to the track, I calculate the weight of wood we’ve cut and carried. Scribbling on a receipt in my car I work out our crop is about six tonnes of wood. That’s not just a lot of furniture, it’s about four tonnes of carbon dioxide, which we’re about to lock up in furniture in our customer’s houses.
Where we’ve cut, the sky is now visible from the coppice floor and a diverse bunch of opportunistic plants are readying to occupy that light until the rapidly regenerating trees close it up again. We had dormice nesting again this winter in brambles and broom dense from two years of open canopy.
This summer the birch will shade the brambles out, but we have more populating elsewhere, ready to house the dormice for their next long sleep later this year. A great joy last summer was seeing bee-adorned foxgloves thriving around stumps after a seventeen year wait since the last cut; their seeds in soily readiness for more than a decade. Although rare, this marvel is not unique to our wood. There are approximately 35,000 hectares of actively managed woodland in the English lowlands, including ours. However, it was once much more: in 1905 there were 250,000 hectares. Given the fillip to biodiversity and the sequestration of carbon, it makes sense to aim for the management hectares of our great grandparents’ era. Because the work is arduous, this is best driven by commercial incentive; literally buying into the products of woodlands will keep them thriving.
Coppiced goods can be hard to find, websites like www.coppice-products.co.uk sell everything from bean-poles and pea-sticks (the native and original bamboo cane), to trugs and baskets. Pale (split chestnut) fencing, woven hurdles, and even gates, are available from suppliers like the impressive Torry Hill fencing, managing 800 acres in Kent. Much coppiced woodland is of course cut for firewood, which seems a shame given the workability of the material. If you see a local wood being cut, perhaps ask the contractor where the wood will go - you might find a local supplier.
Back to London we go with 2019’s harvest to start planing up, and I’m already excited about the prospect of more woodland coming back into management in 2020.