Coppicing

The woodland is divided up into segments (called coupes or compartments), and each year one of those coupes is harvested. The process involves cutting trees back as low to the ground as is practical while the tree is dormant in winter, taking care to make clean, sloped cuts and to take away dead and rotting wood.

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The tree will regrow from the highest point remaining, but not as a single trunk - as a mass of stems. These will thicken each year until harvested again in some years time.

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In Southern England, it's traditional to manage the wood as a coppice with standards - to have rows of coppiced trees, usually hazel or sweet chestnut, interleaved with rows of full sized trees, usually oak.

Hazel is cut on a roughly 10 year rotation; chestnut can be 20; but it all depends on what material you want to harvest.

The area we now know as Oxleas has been wooded back into pre-history. For most of the medieval period, the wood was managed by coppicing - it would have supplied building material and firewood for the small farms on the land below Shooters Hill, and later for the shipyards in Woolwich. In the mid-nineteenth century the woods became the gardens of the great houses built at the top of the hill; the coppices were cleared and then ignored.

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What remained has become the high forest dominated by oak that we know today. There are small areas on Oxleas, Jack and Shepherdleas woods where there has been some coppicing in the last 50 years and where the old hazel stools persist, and it's these areas that the Friends of Oxleas Woodlands volunteers will be working on.

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If you take a walk along Coulthurst's Ride (the main ride through Oxleas Wood), you'll see areas that have been coppiced in the long distant past, and one that was coppiced by volunteers recently. In that area you'll now see young tree growth, dense shrub and ground level vegetation, and a much wider range of insect life. In the areas coppiced further into the past, there is very little ground level vegetation. It's pretty, with the hazel stools arching below the oaks, but there's not much life in it. And that's what coppicing is for.

Coppicing creates permanent, if moving, blocks of early successional habitat. In early stages, light demanding species flourish and we see a resurgence in bluebells and wood anemone. In mid years of the rotation, larger light demanding species such as bramble and honeysuckle are prominent. In the final years of the rotation, the coppiced trees will again choke back the brambles.

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The continual creation and aging of these environments encourages a wide range of species. Permanent clearings and rides do not maintain the same plants - more competitive plants, especially grasses, take over. The process provides several microhabitats in close proximity, benefitting a wide range of species. The small scale of the coupes is also valuable - for low mobility species that require open and semi-open wooded habitats the proximity of their preferred successional habitat is key.

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Beyond the wider ecological benefits, and for the traditional coppicing species such as hazel and sweet chestnut, the process of coppicing is overall beneficial for the tree. It encourages the tree to regenerate and removes diseased and rotting material, extending the lifespan of the tree. Hazel, in particular, lives far longer if coppiced than if left to its own devices.

FOW volunteers will be working in one small section of Oxleas each winter. We'll be coppicing those tree species that respond well to coppicing, and leaving well alone those that we want as standards. Beech, oak, wild service, cherry, yew and guelder rose will all be left.

Hazel, hawthorn, rowan, hornbeam and sweet chestnut will all be coppiced. Some of the chestnuts and hornbeams are too big for us to fell safely ourselves, and will stay as standards until they fall on their own.

Holly, laurel, rhododendron and sycamore, which are all far too vigorous for their ecological value, will be flagged to other volunteer teams working in the wood for removal outside the coppicing season.