So if you have space you can grow 3 coppices in rotation, then you can cut willow every year. On a large scale you can crop your rods for baskets or fuel on a 2 to 5 year cycle – every 3 years being the most popular. Depending on the variety, willow will grow as much as 10 feet (3 metres) in a year. Willow rods grown in a coppice from stools, will grow tall and straight and have an intense colour in the winter – perfect for basketry. The rods will then grow in the same way as they do from stools but much higher up. Pollarding, is when you have a willow tree and cut back the branches to around a foot long from the main trunk. When it starts to grow it will put out rods all around the sides of the stool. The part of the cutting that protrudes above the ground is called a stool. These are fine to get a good root structure going although I prefer the longer sections myself and have soft enough soil to push it three quarters of the way in. Cutting should be 18 to 30 cms long and 8 mm to 1 cm diameter. ![]() To plant a coppice all you need to do is to make cuttings from straight branches that you have cut before and push them into the ground in the early Spring around now. Even a small piece dropped onto the ground will be a sizeable shrub in a year’s time! Unlike some of the other trees where I feel quite guilty even trimming off the lower branches, willow grows like a weed. You don’t have to be gentle when cutting back willow. As a result they had grown spindly and weak (crowding out good trees like the Oak Quercus robur, Chestnut Castanea sativa and Maples Acer campestre) and the high winter winds in January were the final nail in the coffin, causing a lot of them to keel over completely. They were planted quite close to each other which is fine for coppicing but them not pruned back for some years. I have a large amount of willow, across several species, that I inherited in a rather poor condition. Some of his ideas have come from Brian Williamson, who is one of the promoters of the use of hazel, and National Beanpole Week.Last weekend, mid February, I spent coppicing – cutting back my willow Salix spp. ![]() "When I laid hazel initially I used to dig small trenches for the branches to lie in," explains Iain, "but I found that you don't need to - as long as it's pegged down it will propagate." Iain uses the hazel rods that he harvests to make poles, hurdles and for pea-sticks. In 15 years' time there will be another hazel "tree" and after this is cut new stems will grow from these roots and a new hazel stool will have been created. ![]() This pegging down is done with short strong pieces of hazel, as shown below, and at the point where it is pegged down it will send out new roots and a new hazel stool will begin growing. Now he needs a way of keeping it on the ground so that it doesn't spring up and try to grow vertically again. The end of the stalk is now about 7-10 metres away from the stool in a place where Iain wants to establish a new Hazel stool. These he only cuts three-quarters of the way through so that the stalk can be bent over and laid onto the ground. So how does he do it? Iain coppices a hazel stool which has been growing for 15 years - which means he cuts off each rod at ground level, except two or three of the longer ones. He refers local provenance and there is nothing more local than the hazel which has been there for many hundreds of years. As he already has some hazel coppice in the woodland he can create new hazel from what he already has - he doesn't need to buy in plants from a nursery which may be a different strain altogether. Iain Loasby is one such manager and he is extending the area of hazel coppice at Furzefield wood near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. So regularly coppiced hazel is an important part of many working woodlands and you can see why some woodland managers want to increase the amount of hazel in their woodlands. But it's not just about what the wood can be used for - it creates a habitat in which lots of other plants, birds and woodland animals will thrive. ![]() Hazel is also used for making walking sticks and if it grows too big can be converted into charcoal. Traditionally hazel has been used for making thatching pegs that would hold the straw or reeds in place, or for making hurdles (wooden screens). In reality it may also depend on the vicissitudes of management and when the owner gets round to it, but hazel is very forgiving - it just keeps growing and within reason you can adjust what you use it for according to the size it's grown to. Many deciduous woodlands have good growths of hazel coppice: it springs from a single stump or "stool" into long, straight rods which can be cut every 10-15 years and the length of the rotation will depend on what the stems are to be used for.
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