What Is Coppicing? Cutting Trees Down to Keep Them Alive Longer

Many broadleaved trees carry dormant buds beneath the bark and at the base of the trunk, which are suppressed while the canopy is intact and activate when it is removed. Cutting therefore triggers vigorous regrowth from the stump, called the stool, with the shoots growing far faster than a seedling because they draw on a root system already sized for a full tree. Hazel, ash, sweet chestnut, willow, alder, lime, hornbeam and oak all coppice well, while most conifers do not, which is why the practice is essentially confined to broadleaved woodland. The cycle length depends on the species and on what the product is used for, running from three or four years for willow rods up to twenty or more for chestnut poles. Crucially, repeated cutting appears to extend rather than shorten the tree's life, since the stool is continually rejuvenated, and coppice stools in Britain have been dated to well over a thousand years, making them among the oldest living things in the country.

Coppice supplied the raw material for an entire pre-industrial economy, and the products defined the cycle lengths:

• •Firewood and charcoal, the largest use by volume, with charcoal burning being a resident woodland trade and the fuel that smelted iron before coke
• •Hurdles, woven panels of split hazel used as movable sheep fencing and as the framework for wattle and daub walls
• •Thatching spars, bean poles, hedging stakes and tool handles
• •Basketry from willow, grown as osier beds on short rotations
• •Tanbark stripped from oak coppice for the leather industry, which was valuable enough to drive the cutting cycle in some regions
• •Sweet chestnut for fencing and hop poles, still commercially cut in parts of southern England
• •The scale is easy to underestimate: a substantial share of English woodland was managed as coppice for centuries, and the timber trade and the underwood trade were distinct businesses

Coppicing creates a repeating cycle of light and shade across a wood, which supports species that a closed canopy excludes. Immediately after cutting, a coupe is open ground with full sunlight, and the resulting flush of bluebells, primroses, violets and other ground flora is spectacular. Butterflies dependent on open woodland conditions, including several fritillaries, breed in freshly cut and young regrowth and disappear from woods that are no longer cut, and their decline in Britain tracks the abandonment of coppicing closely. Birds including nightingales favour dense young regrowth of a particular age, which means they move around a wood as different coupes mature. A traditionally worked wood cut in rotation contains every stage simultaneously, which is why it supports far more species than either a uniform young wood or a uniform mature one. That is the argument for continuing an economically marginal practice for conservation reasons, and it makes woodland management an active rather than a protective activity.

Coppicing collapsed in the twentieth century because its markets disappeared. Coal replaced charcoal, coke replaced charcoal in smelting, wire fencing replaced hurdles, plastic replaced baskets, and cheap imported timber undercut everything else. Labour costs rose while product values did not. The result was widespread neglect, with coppice woods left uncut and growing into even-aged high forest of no particular value, losing the ground flora and the butterflies in the process, and with many woods cleared or replanted with conifers. Revival has come from three directions: conservation organisations cutting for habitat rather than for profit, a firewood market restored by wood-burning stoves, and a small craft sector supplying hurdles, charcoal and green woodworking. Economic viability remains marginal and depends substantially on grants. The skills survive through volunteer groups and training schemes, and the tools are unchanged, since a billhook and a chainsaw do the same job the billhook alone once did.

Cutting a broadleaf to the ground triggers dormant buds to send up shoots fed by an established root system, so regrowth is rapid and the stool can be cut repeatedly, which extends the tree's life rather than ending it, with some stools over a thousand years old. Coppice supplied charcoal, hurdles, thatching spars and basketry on cycles from three to twenty years. The cutting cycle creates the open conditions that woodland butterflies and ground flora require, which is why abandonment cost those species.