3/12/2023 0 Comments The coppice woodlandSo to keep a wood lasting for centuries it was constantly renewing itself. Coppiced trees last much longer than those left uncut and ash, for example, can live more than 1,000 years as a coppice stool but few mature ashes live more than 250 years. Thus the image of idealised woodland as a static, stately place, fixed by ranks of mature trees is completely modern and only the result of neglect. Most of the standards were oak or ash, and would be cut between the age of 50 and 100 years old. As a whole section or "coup" is always cleared at a time, it meant that all over the country thousands of acres of woodland were being completely cleared and almost all woodland was in every stage of regrowth. So hazel is cut on a seven- to 12-year cycle, ash every 12 to 15 years and oak every 30 years or so. The coppice cycle varies according to the species. "Wood" was for tools, charcoal, logs, greenwood furniture, hurdles and a thousand other practical uses, whereas "timber" was reserved for building and the best furniture or implements such as wagons and carts. "Coppice with standards" is a mixture of trees cut to the ground on a regular cycle for wood with a few uncut specimens – the standards – grown for timber. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man. The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is woodland that grows through our history and culture, and woodland – not monocrop timber plantations – that we should value and guard as jealously as any part of our private and shared cultural heritage. To quote the great Oliver Rackham, who has written more and better about woodland than any other living author: "Trees are wildlife just as deer or primroses are wildlife." The wildlife of deciduous woodland is terribly specific. Trees are complicated, fascinating things, usually older and more beautiful than any of us. Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves. Even where there are great blocks of forestry plantations, especially coniferous ones, they are dark, obliterating places where nothing but the cash crop can grow, where rides cut through like deserted midnight streets. As any visitor to the New Forest immediately notices, a forest often includes large tracts of open land and might or might not contain woodland. A t least the debate about the proposed sale of Forestry Commission land has meant that people are talking about our forests, but it saddens me that I have hardly heard anyone refer to "woodland".
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