I have written about these hazels before - how they must be cut carefully in a nine-year rotation so that the cut "stool" can grow again and again over the years. The cut poles can be useful around the reserve, but coppiced wood has little or no value today.

For a nature reserve, the reasons for coppicing can be to reduce the leaf canopy to allow wild flowers to appear for a few years afterwards and help generally to bring about the biodiversity which we all like to see. It will also ensure that the huge, ugly, dark, untended stools one so often sees in a wood, can be made to look pleasing. But most important of all in our case, is that hazel nuts are a staple diet for the common dormouse (muscardinus avellanarius). They have been seen on the hazels in question, and elsewhere on the reserve. The trouble is they are nocturnal, so few people have ever seen them.

Hazels can be encouraged to fruit well if you prune them in a special way - indeed I tried it to encourage the dormice, but unfortunately it became one of those lesser jobs which are forgotten in other more pressing work. Another wildlife opportunity along this path are the wood ants (formica rufa), whose hills are a feature of our reserve, but which are often ruined and deserted after green woodpeckers (picus viridis) have searched them out as being a good snack-bar.

The coppiced wood can be used for laying hedges, making hurdles, firewood, bean poles and pea sticks all of which were used until about the 1950s and can still be found today rather infrequently unless there is a market for them. I have heard that the decline in large-scale coppicing is now threatened as a wildlife habitat after many centuries of the practice.

I can easily wax enthusiastic about coppicing, particularly because I have added to my knowledge comparatively recently. I know that a number of trees will coppice like the hazel, but it can also be persuaded to become a single tree. Likewise, it can be "layered", which as gardeners know, is a method of growing new plants through an underground stem.

So it seems a pity that the renewable resource of coppice wood - and the hundreds of years of acquired knowledge - are now running to waste. Not to mention the demise of more wildlife habitat.

John Hall © 2007