Willow coppices
Last weekend, mid February, I spent coppicing – cutting back my willow Salix spp. and hazel Corylus avellana. I have a large amount of willow, across several species, that I inherited in a rather poor condition. They were planted quite close to each other which is fine for coppicing but them not pruned back for some years. 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. You don’t have to be gentle when cutting back willow. Unlike some of the other trees where I feel quite guilty even trimming off the lower branches, willow grows like a weed. Even a small piece dropped onto the ground will be a sizeable shrub in a year’s time!
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. Cutting should be 18 to 30 cms long and 8 mm to 1 cm diameter. 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. The part of the cutting that protrudes above the ground is called a stool. When it starts to grow it will put out rods all around the sides of the stool. By late Spring they will be in leaf. It really is that simple!
Pollarding, is when you have a willow tree and cut back the branches to around a foot long from the main trunk. The rods will then grow in the same way as they do from stools but much higher up.
Willow rods grown in a coppice from stools, will grow tall and straight and have an intense colour in the winter – perfect for basketry. Depending on the variety, willow will grow as much as 10 feet (3 metres) in a 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. This allows the rods time to grow. So if you have space you can grow 3 coppices in rotation, then you can cut willow every year. However, if you are not using a huge amount you can just selectively cut from one grove. The best time to coppice is February before the buds start to come out as the soft pussy willow buds appear in early March or late February in a warm year. At this time the plant is fairly dormant and will put all its energy into the new growth.
One useful tip is to lay down weed control fabric over the site of your coppice and push your planting stools through it. This saves a lot of time weeding and prevents other plants growing up and causing the willow to twist or fork. It also prevents quite a few nettle stings when you do come to harvest it! You should also plant them well away from drains (30 metres is good) as the fibrous roots travel! They will seek out and disrupt any underground drains as they like water.
Another good tip is to plant several different varieties. This have two main benefits. Firstly it provides excellent winter colour variation and choice of colour for weaving. Secondly, mixed variety coppices are healthier and more resistant to willow rust and willow beetle.
If you are planting in rows it is best to push the cuttings in 60 cm apart with two rows 75 cm apart. Then allow a 150 cm gap to walk down before planting the next two rows. (You can plant long rods horizontally under the soil, as willow will also sprou right along the length, but as it will not do this evenly cuttings are more accurate for a good looking coppice!)
The first year around 3 rods will probably grow and it is best to cut the willow back to 10 cm above the ground the following February as this will encourage more rods to grow so you have a nice thick base with 10 to 20 shoots from it.
Hazel coppices
Hazel will also grow in the same way and is particularly nice from making woodland coppices. Planted in random without weed control cloth, the ground around the cuttings can be planted with woodland plants. Wild Garlic Allium ursinum, Wild Primroses Primula vulgaris, Wood Anemone Anemone nemorosa, Wood Sorrel Oxalis acetosa, Lesser Celandine Ranunculus ficaria and Woodruff Galium odoratum among others. I have Lady’s Smock Cardamine pratensis growing under mine too whose leaves and flowers are a lovely addition to early Spring salads with their peppery, mustardy tang. Some people also like Bluebells Hyacinthoides non-scripta although they are not a favourite of mine.
The advantage of hazel is also that if you allow it to grow into a tree, and control the height, you will also have hazel nuts in the winter. I got a great crop this year as I learned to pick them slightly green before the squirrels did and let them go brown sitting out on paper in a warm dry place.
This year in January, I planted some more hazel trees in my coppice from pollarded rods that were probably 3 or 4 years old rather than cuttings. This has given me ‘instant’ small trees about shoulder height and a month later they are already producing green catkins.
Other plants for coppicing
There are quite a few other plants you can coppice. I have Dogwood Cornus sanguinea and Elder Sambucus nigra here at Wychmoss. You can also coppice Poplar Populus tremula, Beech Fagus sylvatica, Hornbeam Carpinus betulus and Yew Taxus baccata.
Willow rods for sale
Do get in touch if you would like to buy willow rod bundles for baskets, fencing or garden structures. Willow species I have probably include White Willow Salix alba, Golden Willow Salix alba ‘Vitellina, Purple Willow Salix purpurea, an undetermined Red Willow and possibly a Goat Willow Salix caprea. And don’t forget the Dogwood Cornus spp. in various colours.
Incredibly useful info, thank you! I’ve been planting willow for coppice (and because its lovely!), and will be planting some hazel this year.
Thanks. I put in a hazel stand last year and those that survived a wandering deer are doing well! I’ve got several different species of willow now, one tip, don’t plant it too near to any drainage as the roots grow towards water and can be really disruptive!
Excellent ”
Think I’d better move my willow
Opps
Blessings
Grw.
You planted it near a drain then?!
I want to plant a living hazel hedge….. can i just put hazel rods into the earth, or does one soak till it produces roots… it is september, i had chance to collect some, so hope it right time of year…. i put them to soak in water.. anyone done this???? Can give me tips please.
also, none of the trees where i got them, had nuts are there male and female trees i would like cobs from the fence…
advice please. Lin
You can just push the rods into the ground (they like an alkaline soil) and keep them well-watered. You can do this any time between October and March but they may not sprout until the Spring though. Put several in the ground in case you lose some. When you cut them, put a sloping cut in the bottom and straight cut the top so you remember which way up to plant them. Hazel is monoecious (male and female flowers are found on the same tree) but they don’t self-pollinate so need to be pollinated by other hazel trees, so you need to plant several anyway. They can take up to 5 years to produce nuts. Don’t know why your local trees don’t have nuts… perhaps the birds/squirrels got them, the pollen was damaged by poor weather in the spring, wrong soil….
Very useful info, thanks. Just one question though, why would you coppice elder? It doesn’t burn too well.
You might want to keep it more like a bush than a tree if you’re regularly harvesting flowers or berries.
I harvest elder for burning in an open fire, and it burns really well with plenty of heat and no spitting.
Seasoned naturally for 12 months
Hello and thank you for an interesting piece on coppicing. A few years back I attended a hedge laying course and have been doing some hedge laying every year since. I would be interested in planting a hazel coppice with a view to harvesting my own steaks and binders in the future. What would be the best plant spacing when planning a hazel coppice.
Mine are about 4 feet apart but I know a bigger coop ice where the stools are 3 ft apart in rows that are 5 ft apart from each other. I think it will depend what length of rotation you’re planning.
Very interesting. One question. If I plant hazels from rods, do I need to make sure they are from different trees? Otherwise the new trees will all be clones and therefore I’d think not able to fertilise each other – is that right? If it is, one would even to make sure the different trees themselves came from different trees….
I don’t think that follows as plants have used cloning as a reproductive technique for millennia. Hazels are also self-fertile containing both male catkins and female flowers on the same tree so can produce some nuts without another tree. Having said that, they are wind pollinated so you’ll get much better results if a group of them are planted together and genetic diversity is always a plus.
Thanks Monica, I’m off to do some coppicing in NW Leics in a couple of weeks, first time in more than a few decades! Will let you know how we get on.
Hello Monica, I have planted fast growing willow 1/1-5 metres from a cornish hedge (stone & earth). There are large ash and sycamore on top of the hedge already. Do you think there roots will affect the hedge.
It’s quite close so there might be some competition but willow is pretty tough.
How do you get the willowstool waist height so you do have to bend down or crouch the cut?
Cut the willow stems to waist height. They will grow from any height.
Hi Monica, I have the use of a corner of a field in Leicestershire, that is bordered by hawthorne bushes along 2 sides. I have bee hives on this site and would like to box them in so to speak by planting a double hedge of willow and hazel around 100 yards long, do you think this would work. If so, would I alternate planting 1 willow 1 hazel and how far apart. The purpose is to give protection to the bees from the exposed side as well as to provide pollen source for the bees in early spring.
Why not. Suggest a double hedge with stools pushed in 12” apart and a second row 12” back, with the intervals staggered to the centres of he first row. Keep the stools low to ground so they grow bushy and keep it trimmed.
Hi Monica Wilde. Thanks for the article. Very informative. I am looking for any tips/advise on establishing Hazel by cuttings. I have googled this and there seems to be a consensus that hazel is quite tricky to root from cuttings with many suggestions of using layering or growing from seed instead? To give some context,a group of us are guerilla gardening a disused stone quarry (shaped like a dormant volcano crater) there is very little soil. We are trying to create a food forest mainly to promote bio-diversity of wildlife flora and fauna.The site has been self seeded by mainly Ash and Sycamore trees growing very close together ( 2 to 3 feet apart was quite common) all growing very tall and spindly. When we first started to manage the site (about 3 years ago) there was very little ground cover because of the closed canopy so our first job was to thin out the trees till they were about 3 to 4 metres apart. We laid the felled trees out on contour lines around bowl of the crater to create terraces of dead hedges to try and encourage buildup of soil and create wildlife habitats. This has worked quite well and now this year we have seen lots of ground-cover with lots of new plant and animal species. last winter we planted about 2000 willow cuttings along these contour lines, but we had a very poor success rate (maybe about 50 to a hundred sapling in leaf, as of this July). I am not sure if the rest have failed to root or have been eaten by deer (we just stuck the cuttings in the ground with no deer guards). Sorry for rambling on. Anyway.. we would like to see a coppiced understory of hazel, and other native trees to help the food chain.. so any help or advise on getting hazel to grow would be very welcome.
Hi John, I have seen similar information re Hazel – were you able to establish how to succeed with Hazel cuttings? This will be my first time trying elder cuttings – do you know why your success rate was so poor (any advice?) Thanks
Your willow may have been poor because of the low amount of soil in a quarry. Willow don’t like dry or well-drained soil. They like damp soils and water – so much so that their roots will often grown into drains creating a blockage. So you might have been better with holly, hawthorn, elder and crabapple and dog rose growing through it. Hazel needs a moist but not damp soil. They’re naturally a woodland tree that like the leaf litter, humus and light shade created by other trees such as oak. So might be challenging in a quarry until you have more soil built up. If you’re trying them now I don’t think cuttings would work. They are much fussier than willow which is why they are more commonly layered and will expire with any dryness or late frosts despite promising beginnings. One way to get them started might be to invest in some small trees, planted far apart in a good bucket load of humid-enriched fertile soil. Coppice them except for 4 strong leaders, then peg two per side down to start a layer. Nick the leaders and apply a rooting hormone to help, then peg the nicked part down. Once they start to grow, repeat the process by pegging two leaders in direction away from the parent plant, and leave a few to grow. Etc. Eventually you’ll have joined up all the parent trees with a hedge. The shoots grow approx 1/2 metre a year (give or take).
I have a living willow structure in my garden that I built following attending a course in West Yorkshire some 5 years ago. As you can imagine, it has pretty much torn itself apart by now in its desire to grow up rather than across…. I want to harvest the lovely long upright wands to store and use next spring in my next willow “build”. I’m posting here to ask advice on the timing of this and also storage method/place. Also whether you or any of your readers can recommend a good manual on living willow sculpture and more general management of small scale (urban garden) willow. Thanks. Jen
You can prune the wands off now and store them for use next year. Obviously they won’t grow again. If you want to weave with them you’re best to soak them before use. If you want them to grow in the new structure you’ll need to cut them and push them into the ground immediately to give them a chance and I’d do this in March. However they will never be as good or as stable as wands grown from a stool – but you would have to wait a few years. Swings and roundabouts! As for books: Making Bentwood Trellises, Arbors, Gates and Fences by Jim Long https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/158017051X/ and Living Willow Sculpture by Jon Warnes https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0855328347/