Coppicing & Pollarding
John looks at the art of coppicing and pollarding ...
Coppicing and pollarding shrubs
Shrubs grown for their colourful stems or foliage, such as dogwood, need to be cut down every spring to 4-5 buds to encourage new growth.
This is known as coppicing.
Coppicing: cutting back trees and shrubs close to the ground to encourage young, vigorous growth, particularly used as a woodland management technique and for the production of willow wands, etc, for fencing and basket weaving.
Coppicing, also called stumping, is a drastic form of pruning that stimulates growth in certain shrubs.
In issue 63's At Home Gardener: Ken Druse on Coppicing Shrubs, we showed you how to get colorful winter stems on your shrubs by using the age-old pruning style of coppicing. You can do a similar technique, known as pollarding, on trees.
When trees are cut to the ground in this manner, it's called 'coppicing,' and gives us our word 'copse,' meaning a dense growth of bushes (or a thicket).
Shearing.
The bright bark colour of some shrubs can be encouraged by coppicing or hard annual pruning in spring.
a medieval technique in which trees or bushes are regularly cut back to low stumps (STOOLS) to promote the growth of many straight stems useful in the garden as pea sticks and supports. Chestnut and hazel are traditional trees for coppicing.
 See also: Plant, Gardening, Shrub, Growing, Produce
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