6 Comments

Ever since your piece on how to read landscapes, I've been seeing coppiced trees everywhere. It's great to learn more and realise that this is something that is done on purpose!

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It explains so much of the forest once you recognize it. Suddenly an area with a bunch of weird trees makes sense because someone or something must have cleared the spot 75 years ago and never followed up. It's like CSI, tree edition. Or, as I'd call it-- Tree-SI (yes, I'll see myself out).

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Learnt some good new things from this, thanks Andy. I’ve been pollarding really large non-native trees on my farm, and it’s amazing how they reshoot so well. I’ve been using them as supports (and shading) for my vanilla bean vines and black pepper vines. We also do coppicing to the nitrogen fixing trees I grew alongside my main fruit trees in a syntropic sort of fashion. I now feel a bit more connected to my ancient ancestors. Thank you.

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That's awesome! leveraging what you've got can be difficult, esp when it might not be what you wanted, but is one way to help bridge the gap between the ecosystem you want and the one you've got, for better or worse.

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Great stuff! I've got trees, mostly sycamore, in my paddocks that my horses have turned into multi-stemmed, shrubby forms. This makes me think that humans discovered coppicing by observing the effects of grazing animals on trees and how useful the results were.

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I have no doubt that forests when humans started to explore the world were covered in coppiced threes from megafauna, and we figured out that came with benefits for us too!

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