Why have you chopped all the trees down? (an essay so you don't have to endure a lecture from me at the party)

Well, we haven’t of course, but we have cleared about an acre this winter. 

This is coppicing and it is essential for the health of the woodland and the insects, birds and plants  that live in it. The trees will recover really quickly – this is what happens after the first year

Silver Wood is in Old Park Wood, a semi-natural ancient woodland of coppiced sweet chestnut and oak standards with invasive birch. What does that mean?

The semi-natural refers to the fact that the woodland has been managed throughout its recent and more distant history. Chestnut isn’t a true native tree in the UK and some people think it was brought over by the Romans. Whether that is true or not, it was certainly planted and before chestnut there may have been hornbeam or hazel.

The ancient designation is because the wood has been woodland for as long as records exist, which in our case go back to the 17^th century or so. In fact the borders of the wood haven’t changed from when they were first drawn on a map and its quite possible that the wood has been woodland all the way back to the original wild wood or weald.

The chestnut is an understory tree – that is, it was grown for some time, typically 10-15 years and then cut down at its base when it springs up again with many shoots. This gives it the typical appearance of a coppiced tree and these cut and regrowth cycles can be maintained for a very long time meaning the small trees you see in our wood are just the latest shoots from an organism that might be a hundred or more years old.

The standards are the oak trees that are scattered about the wood. These would have been planted for constructional timbers and before that for warships – Britain’s walls of oak – many of which were built in the Chatham dockyards not so far away. Apparently Henry VIII made a law that all woodlands had to have oak standards to maintain supply for the Navy. A medieval version of military drivers for the economy I guess.

The silver birch is a natural early invasive species and the fact that we have so much of it reflects the fact that the wood has been pretty much neglected for a decade or two. Coppicing the wood has real benefits for biodiversity as it  performs the same function as forest fires in places like Australia or North America in removing the canopy trees that prevent light from reaching the ground. Coppicing, and the light it brings, allows a whole range of flowering plants to spring up and this attracts insects and then these bring in the birds. As the trees grow up the young coppice provides nesting and hiding places for the birds.

In the distant past the wood had a substantial economic value (as well as Henry’s military value). It was owned by the Glassenbury estate, the estate and house behind the Peacock inn. The wood was used as a fuel supply and probably livestock feed (the leaves, acorns and chestnuts would all have been used for pigs and other animals) and would have generated income from products such as charcoal and timber. The earliest map shows the wood as a fenced area – a forest – suggesting it was also used for hunting. A reference to the charcoal can still be seen in the name of the road and school next to the wood – colliers green. Later the wood was used for hop poles and fencing but as the hop industry took a serious knock and as people turn to less labour intensive fencing, value of the wood products fell and the coppicing stopped maybe 15-20 years ago.

Now we are trying to improve the biodiversity by opening up the rides (paths) and wherever possible reinstating a coppice cycle. Last winter Peter Twedell coppiced a whole acre. A fantastic bit of kit loaded onto a tractor made light work of the trees.

You can see the bluebells benefiting from the new, light woodland where it has been coppiced

What makes this now economically viable is the cost of gas and oil and the growth of wood burning stoves. This is the last of four stacks of poles about to go off for kiln drying after which they will be sold by Peter’s company (http://www.bertieswoodfuel.co.uk/) for firewood.

I cant keep up with the tractor but you can see the effect of a little light forestry on the rides here – see the growth in the first spring up to the line of standing trees where it all goes dark again

Last year I heard the first nightingale in the wood, and flushed lots of woodcocks that like the cover the new coppice growth brings, and we saw more orchids than we have seen before. 

Its good to see the woods coming back to life. Which is why we have chopped some of the trees down…..