Cut the Top Off a Tree and It Lives Longer. Considerably Longer

A young tree is cut through at a height of two to four metres. It responds by producing a crown of new shoots from the cut surface, which grow rapidly into straight poles. Those are harvested after some years, and the tree responds again, and the cycle repeats indefinitely. Over generations the cutting point swells into a broad knobbly head on top of a straight trunk, which is why an old example is instantly recognisable and looks nothing like a tree of the same species left alone.

The height is the whole point and distinguishes the practice from cutting at ground level:

• •New shoots are out of reach of grazing cattle and deer
• •So the tree can stand in pasture rather than in fenced woodland
• •Which allows trees and grazing on the same ground
• •Cutting at ground level requires the animals to be excluded
• •The trunk continues to grow and support the head
• •Both practices produce poles on a repeating cycle

Regular cutting extends the life of a tree dramatically, and the reason is mechanical as much as biological. A tree left alone grows an ever larger crown that eventually exceeds what its trunk and roots can support, and it is brought down by wind or by its own weight. Cutting the crown back repeatedly keeps that load small, keeps the tree in a juvenile growth pattern and removes the branches that would have become heavy limbs. Trees managed this way reach ages of several hundred years where an uncut specimen of the same species would have fallen long before.

The crop had specific uses and the cutting cycle was set by what was wanted. Poles cut after three or four years were used for basketry, hurdles, thatching spars and bean poles. Cut after seven to fifteen years they made fencing, tool handles, cart parts and rafters. Longer cycles produced timber for building. Branches too small for anything else were bundled as firewood and for firing bread ovens and brick kilns. Leafy branches cut in summer were dried and stored as winter fodder for livestock, which is a practice older than hay and largely forgotten.

The old trees left by this practice are ecologically valuable out of proportion to their number. Age alone produces habitat, since a very old tree develops hollows, rot pockets, loose bark and dead wood that support specialised insects, bats, birds and fungi found almost nowhere else. Because the practice created large numbers of very old trees in places where trees would not otherwise reach that age, it is responsible for a substantial share of surviving veteran trees in western Europe. Restarting cutting on a tree neglected for decades is risky, since a large neglected head may not survive the shock.

Cutting a tree at two to four metres produces a crop of poles out of reach of grazing animals, which allows trees and livestock on the same ground and builds a swollen knobbly head over generations. Keeping the crown small stops the tree outgrowing its own support, so managed trees reach several hundred years. Those veterans carry habitat found almost nowhere else.