New-cut coppice springs. After you cut to the ground, the wood jumps back into the sky, not quite as quickly but as surely as a spring trap. A coppice wood cut down in winter comes up in the season of flowers like so many tense erections. Each shoot reaches at least six feet tall in its first year’s growth, some twelve feet or more. Springtime, the name by which every English speaker calls the May, means exactly that: the time when the coppice springs.
Shakespeare loved to pun on the season’s word. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the players sing a song called simply “Spring.” In it, the flowers of meadow and of freshly coppiced woods appear, as does the cuckoo, a once widespread European migrant bird with a mixed reputation. Its cuckoo song means spring is here, but the bird lays its eggs in the nests of others, particularly in those of common coppice dwellers like reed warbler, garden warbler, pipit, robin, and dunnock. The host birds don’t know it until a foreign chick grows up in their nest. A cuckold is the bird (or the man) who raises another’s young. The cuckoo’s song is “a word of fear to married ear,” as it suggests the ungovernable power of all the season’s erections.
The fact that thousands upon thousands of trees could be cut in a coppice wood and reliably return again and again was music to my ears. I, with my mere forty London planes to pollard, might relax a little bit. I was even happier when I saw such a coppice with my own eyes. Pete Fordham has cared for Bradfield Wood in England’s Sussex since the 1980s. The site is a mix of heavy alkaline clays with lenses of acid sands. It likes to grow ash, hazel, sallow, oak, field maple, and especially alder. Where almost every other coppice in the United Kingdom had been lost by the time of World War II, this rural wood survived because it was the source of handles for a rake factory. That business had struggled on until 1964, so the wood had gone only two decades uncut when Fordham and his colleagues took it up again. Every species on it, they coppiced.
How quickly the locals had forgotten! When Fordham cut the first trees in the woods to the ground, some of the neighbors inquired, “Oh good! What are you going to plant there now?” It might even be that some of their parents had worked in the rake factory, but all that they had known had been forgotten. “We aren’t planting anything,” he had answered. “The trees will grow again all by themselves.”
Indeed, until 1964, the trees at Bradfield Wood had been cut on a regular cycle of twelve to fifteen years since the twelfth century. Not only did Fordham not need to sow anything, but when he began to cut, a vast seed bank of ancient woodland plants saw the light of day again. Hundreds of species rushed into the newly opened spaces. You do not clear-cut an entire coppice wood, Fordham explained to me. Rather, you work in stages, a section at a time. In that way, the youngest newest sprouts stand cheek by jowl with veterans of fifteen years’ growth. A wide-open meadow with new-growing stems adjoins one where the trees are beginning to limit the light that reaches the ground, which in turn adjoins another where the canopies have covered the entire space, making an even shade.
A coppice wood is a not a single thing, but a synthetic ecosystem in which human participation is the key. Far more species of plants, insects, birds, and other creatures inhabit such a mixed landscape than would live in an untouched woodland. And the fact that it is cut in a rhythmic cycle keeps a living seed bank in the dirt and reassures a tremendous variety of animal life that it can safely live there as long as it pleases. A coppice is a continuing performance, a long-running show. So important did Queen Elizabeth and her councilors regard its survival that they gave Fordham an MBE (Member of the British Empire), the next best thing to being made a lord.
A coppice woodland is divided into sections by a system of ditches and banks: The earth dug out to a depth of three feet or more around the edge of each part is thrown up to make a tall bank on the inside. Each piece was called by many different names: coupe, sale, cant, fell, burrow, or hagg. Within a given wood, each piece also had its own proper name, by which everyone in the neighborhood knew it: Strawberry Bank, Cottage Fell, Hannah’s Close, Foxhunter’s Fell, Lynderswood, Hearse Wood, Alsa Wood, Alice Tails, Tindhawe, Chertheage, Lodge Coppice, Beggarshall Coppice, Spittlemore Coppice, Old Women’s Weaver, Six Wantz Ways. The system of barriers was in part to limit the intrusion of the stock—cattle, pigs, or sheep—into the young resprouting coppice. Sometimes, it was topped with a hedge. Mainly, it marked what to cut and what to leave in any given year.
To keep a coppice woodland is an art. Each of its woodsmen had a double aim: to renew the woods by harvesting wood. He had to manage not just the trees, but also flowers, berries, shrubs, birds, dormice, butterflies, deer, and visitors. The cutting came first. Different trees liked different ways. For hazel or alder, he cut as close to the dirt as he could get. For older stools of ash or willow, maple, birch, linden, sycamore, or elm, a forester like Fordham typically cut at an angle six inches or more above the ground. Some of the trunks so cut were as thick as telephone poles, others the breadth of a human arm, others slender and whippy like beanpoles, according to the species of the tree, to the sun regime in which it had grown, and to the purpose for which it was kept. The skill of the woodsman was to know the trees in the haggs and how each was likely to respond to a different kind of cut. The dirt, the species, the sun, the water might all play a role. He had to respond to the whole landscape.
A fell was between half an acre and five acres in size. When first cut, it looked stone dead, littered with stumps. The shade-loving, four-leaved woodland plant called herb Paris had burned tips. A few sedges bravely tried to poke up their heads. Especially if he looked next door at a maturing hagg, a young forester might well have thought he’d overdone it and killed them all. He rejoiced just as much when the first poles sprung as I did when my pollards first leafed. But where my landscape was carefully controlled, his was a flower bomb.
In the first three years following the cut, the sunlit dirt bloomed. At Queen’s Wood in London, the gardeners counted 39 plant species in a hagg when they coppiced it in 2009. Three years later, the same acre had added 156 more. Most of them had waited dormant for the years since the last cut. Some jumped into the cant from nearby gardens.
Most of the plants had done the same decade by decade for more than a thousand years. As they lived with people, the plants told them their names. Moschatel, so called for its pungent odor, was also called five-faced bishop and townhall clock for its five-sided flower. Good Friday plant was another of its names, since it bloomed in Holy Week. The pignut was known as St. Anthony’s nut. Its thick buried corm—a storage organ like those in daffodils or gladiolus—was delicious to swine. Anthony was the patron saint of pigs. People also ate the corm. They compared it with chestnut and swore it inflamed desire. Saint-John’s-wort had little yellow flowers that were burned in the Midsummer’s Bonfire on St. John’s Eve. These flowers cured depression, prevented infection, and were treated as symbols of the sun. The wild daffodil or Lenten lily—a parent of so many thousands of daffodil cultivars and along with early purple orchid the first sign of spring on the ground—grew thickly when exposed to light and often persisted even into the final pole stage of the coppice cant. (In the 1930s, “daffodil special” sightseeing trains left London, bound for fields where they flourished.) The delicate wood speedwell, its light blue petals shot through with dark blue rays, was a universal tonic for everything from indigestion to gout. The Romans brought it back from their European conquests and spread it around the world. “Speedwell” is a lovely word. It means good fortune.
Herb Paris, which sprung prolifically in the new cut coppice as well as in the closed wood, had four equal leaves, disposed in two pairs. It was long thought that these represented the true lover’s knot, where two half hitches are tied one into the other, making a very strong knot. Lovers made the knot with tree limbs and if the knot grew true in the coming year, their love would last. (As rock climbers, we know this as a knot that will securely join two ropes, even if they are frozen solid.) Be that as it may, the deep black button of fruit was deadly poison.
When my wife and I were courting, she taught me that the bright yellow buttercup, held beneath the chin, would tell if the chin’s person loves butter. The yellow would show on the chin. (I suspect this was one of those games that brought men and women near to touching, in a gentle and exploratory way.) Called crowflowers in much of Britain, the buttercups also meant maidens, but they could suggest unfaithfulness.
John Clare, the great poet of the English countryside, loved the coppice for its early flowers. When all the ground was yet bare or even laced with snow at the blear end of winter, in the young cut copses, already flowers were stirring:
Beneath your ashen roots primroses grow
from dead grass tufts and matted moss once more
Sweet beds of vi’lets dare again be seen
In their deep purple pride and sweet display’d
The crow flowers, creeping from the naked green,
Add early beautys to thy sheltering shade
In the fourth year after the cut, the young poles of the resprouting coppice began to shadow the ground. Life changed in their shade. The bramble and raspberry that had sprouted with the sun-loving flowers, first in little spiny fingers, then in feathery sharp branchlets, suddenly covered every bit of open ground. By year’s end, the meadowy landscape had become a thicket. All the other flowers had retreated to the edges or dropped down their seed to wait for a change of days. No new species were added at this stage. Not a square inch of ground could be seen. Two more years passed, the poles growing taller and spreading wider, the spiny shrubs rambling over everything beneath them.
By about the seventh year after the cut, the spreading tops of the coppice trees first closed the canopy. They quickly shaded out both raspberry and bramble. The two disappeared even more quickly than they had come. Under this canopy, the ground opened again and the shade dwellers emerged. Some of these, like herb Paris and daffodils, were the same as had grown at first, but now they were joined by bluebells, dog mercury, wood anemones, ivy, and an occasional insistent bramble. There are few things as lovely in all the world as nests of smooth, striped, or blocky gray, brown, and gray-brown tree stems shooting out of a carpet of bluebells like fireworks in a deep blue sky.
At Bradfield Wood there were only about seventy plant species in the closed coppice wood, a third of those that had grown in sun. Under the regime of the closed canopy, these plants would grow on until the coppice was felled again, somewhere between the fifteenth and twenty-fifth year.
Each coppice cant is a woodland history in miniature, repeated again and again as the cycle of cutting comes round. If there are fifteen cants in a given woods, though, it is only one scene in the performance. The art was to mix all of the stages in a way that could help the whole to thrive. The annual rhythm of cutting might move in a round, from one cant to the next in space. This brought better light to the young panels, but it also helped the animals that preferred a given stage to stay with it. Also, the scrubby tops of the new-cut coppice made effective fencing to keep animals out of the slightly older meadowy haggs. The tops of next year’s cut might reinforce last year’s fences, as well as make its own, and so on around the whole coppice.
The woodsman managed the animals in the coppice, both to control and to encourage them. In the first four years, deer might devour and destroy the resprouts. Fencing and hunting kept them out. (Today, when deer are a serious problem, Fordham has hired skilled marksmen to cull the herd.) In later stages, however, the same animals helped control bramble, so he let them in. Noticing how a mammal liked to live, a thoughtful woodsman might create invisible highways. Every coppice is crisscrossed with rides, open pathways that give access to the cants. They are a barrier to the dormouse, who prefers to stay off the ground, passing from tree to tree. (Bushy tailed and omnivorous, dormice are a sign of a healthy coppice wood.) The woodsman left one or two long branches on an ash or oak or hazel, to bridge the ride aloft, giving safe passage to the dormice.
Like the plants, the birds tended to prefer one or two of the woodland stages. The tree pipit, white throat, dunnock, and yellow hammer thrived in early-stage coppice. The thicket stage, with its thick ground cover, attracted large numbers of nesting birds, including wrens, robin, nightingale, blackbird, warblers (especially the garden and willow warblers), bullfinch, black cap, and chiffchaff. Tits and robins loved the later pole stage. These were the chief victims of the cuckoo’s cuckoldry. The nightingale and cuckoo, the most frequent birds in British poetry, are coppice lovers. The cut woods were a resource not only for fuel and tools but for the imagination.
There are about 200,000 species of insects now in Britain. Half of them depend on human-altered landscapes. About a fifth of these live in deadwood, which though common in pollard woods, old orchards, and hedgerows, is rare in the fells, the haggs and panels. Many of the rest, especially the butterflies, delight in coppice. Adults of a species often feed on the nectar of many flowers, but the larvae can feed only on one or a small group of species. Without these flowers, the species cannot breed. The Duke of Burgundy, the checkered skipper, and the fritillaries—the pearl-bordered, small pearl-bordered, high brown, heath, and silver-washed—are all declining with the loss of coppice. The fritillaries, for example, depend upon the dog violets, except for the heath fritillary, whose young can feed only on cow wheat. Both plants are found sometimes in rides, heaths, and meadows, but regularly and dependably in new-cut coppice panels up to three or four years old. Many of the species cannot disperse across wide areas of the land, so the rhythmic cutting of coppice fells—cyclically renewing their favored habitat—is crucial to their survival. When one fell grows too thick, another has just been new formed.
For a thousand years at Bradfield Wood, people have harvested the wood. In the act, they did not destroy the woodland. They made it stronger and more beautiful. Seeing it, I was more grateful for my plane trees. They stood in a long line of revenants. They could be counted on. I might relax and do my part to make them lovely and long lived.