Plotting a coupe

The coppice season is here and now is the time to plot out how best to create, or perhaps more accurately re-create, Pop’s wood first hazel coupe. Pop’s wood has various different sections where one particular tree species dominates but at the bottom of the wood, where the hazel is most populace, there is a real tussle for dominance. The larger trees including ash, oak and wild cherry have outgrown the shorter trees like hazel, field maple and hawthorn and are now beginning to shade them out.

The major part of re-establishing the hazel coppice is to remove the greater part of the canopy and let the sunlight and rainfall reach the coppiced stumps. Each hazel coppice is separated into a number of compartments or coupes. Typically each of these would be at least 0.25 acres in area and there would be the same number of coupes as the cycle of coppicing. So if the coppicing was to be carried out every 7 years there would ideally be 7 coupes. The thinking here is that each stage of a coppice’s lifecycle provides ideal habitat for a number of animals and birds. If the coupes are situated close to each other then as each coupe is coppiced it is likely that an ideal alternative coupe for the animals to move to is available nearby. One of the first jobs is to walk amongst the existing trees and try and assess where best to set the boundaries for the first new coupe.

As the picture above shows there’s a lot of sense to be made of the existing trees and the initial effect will be quite startling!

I have identified and marked out an oblong footprint measuring approx. 100ft wide by 120ft long. This is as near as makes no difference 0.25 acre so is a good start. The next job has been to identify how many viable hazel trees there are currently within that patch. The total is not very high as it came out to be 21. Assuming that each of these existing stools will be capable of layering say a further 3 hazel trees each then that total is pushed up to 63 ish.

For an ideal coppice the distance between each hazel stool/tree should be 2.5m which means that the planned density of plants is about 150 – 200! So a bit of a shortfall then.

There are a number of ways of tackling this shortfall:

• buy in an appropriate number of new plants and get them into the ground and growing straight after coppicing and layering the existing stools;
• take a load of hardwood cuttings from the existing trees before they are coppiced and plant them in the nursery for planting on in the coppice when they have become established (takes two years);
• wait until the freshly coppiced stools have put up new shoots and then carry out a further coppice/layering exercise and increase the density again (probably in two years time).

I guess like most problems the solution will be a combination of all the above and some more options that develop along the way. No need to leap at the first idea I don’t think. However it strikes me as sensible to take cuttings and set up a separate nursery anyway as that way I can be preparing the restocking requirements for the next coupe in a couple of years time.

Anyway back to the list of things to do which currently looks like this:

• set out the coupe area
• carry out tree survey and identify viable hazel stools
• identify those trees that are going to have to be felled
• identify any larger trees that are going to be grown alongside the coppice as “standards” (these are trees with a reasonably straight and clear stem that can be grown amongst the coppice for timber without shading out the hazel beneath)
• complete the coppice but leave the layering stems upright
• fell the trees and clear the timber
• complete the low level cutting of the stools and layering
• fence off the area to provide protection against the deer, badgers and deer using split hazel poles where suitable
• sit back and wait for things to take their course periodically checking the integrity of the fencing

Simples.

More next time……………………..