Welcome to our 2025-2026 coppicing season!

It's been a few years since we’ve done much coppicing in Oxleas wood, and far far longer since there’s been a consistent rotation of coppicing across the wood. Much of the originally coppiced area is now high forest, but there are still some areas where we think it's worthwhile to restore the coppice.

What is coppicing, you ask? It's a historically common, traditional method of woodland management that cuts trees and shrubs close to the ground to form a ‘stool’ which grows new stems during the next few years.  While that is happening, we get a lot more light reaching the woodland floor, which creates diverse habitats and increases the number of species our woods can support. You can read more about our reasons for coppicing here.

This will be the first year our new coppicing group has run, and we’re excited to see how far we can get. 

We’re working in the triangle bounded by the Wogebourne, Coulthurst's ride, and the unnamed ride running southeast from Hotel Field. If you look carefully, you may find some yellow forestry marking paint on hazel, hawthorn and chestnut. Maybe you’ll also find some pink marking paint - this is coppicing work that will be carried out for Thames21, who are also doing some work along the line of the Wogebourne this winter. 

We believe that coppicing will improve the biodiversity of the area, but we’d like to check and be sure. We’ve done a little survey work on the coupe, and what we can find there in late September:

Hazel

Trees

We have a nice range of tree species in the coupe. Oak, hazel, hawthorn, sweet chestnut, wild service tree, downy birch, silver birch, european aspen, rowan, ash, wild cherry, cherry plum, norway maple, field maple and yew are all present. Less happily, so are sycamore, holly and cherry laurel.

Male Fern

Understory

Most of these plants are found where there is a gap in the canopy, or at the edges of the coupe.  Wood millet, wood sage, bracken, male fern, garlic mustard, dandelion, green dock, bramble, honeysuckle, ivy, violet are all present to some degree.

In the main body of the coupe, only bramble and honeysuckle are doing well. 

Fungus, lichen and moss

Our volunteers are doing their best, but identification of fungi, mosses and lichens are specialist skills. Our best efforts say we have cypress-leaved plait moss, common powderthorn, white cheese polypore and birch polypore present. If you are an expert and want to survey for us, we’d love to hear from you!

Fallen silver birch with birch polypore