Pollarding and Coppicing - what is the difference?

I keep getting questions on this theme! 

So here's a brief overview of what they are, and what the difference is. 

Pollarding and Coppicing

Why am I getting questions now, in the middle of winter? Because this is the time of year to pollard or coppice those shrubs that really benefit from this specialised pruning: and this is the time of year when people tend to look at their wild, scraggly, overgrown shrubs, and wonder what can be done about them!

If you're not familiar with those terms, then, they both mean the same thing: cutting off all the minor stems of a tree or shrub to a certain point, all at the same time, on a regular cycle. 

 The most familiar ones are those street trees that you see, the ones that are savagely cut back by the council every few years, until they are just a trunk with a bunch of knobbles on the top. 

That's pollarding. 

Here - left - are some Lime trees which have just been pollarded, and yes, I know it looks brutal, but it keeps the tree down to a manageable height, and I promise  you it does not harm the tree at all.

In fact, it has been proven that pollarding extends the life of a tree: and in the case of coppicing, it can extend it almost indefinitely! There are Hazel coppices which are estimated to be hundreds of years old, and yet the normal lifespan of a Hazel is only 70-80 years.

Amazing.

Coppicing, then, is exactly the same as pollarding, but at ankle height:  and when walking on footpaths through scrappy old bits of woodland, you may well have seen Hazel trees, growing as a mad tuft of straight stems which sprout from ground level, instead of growing like a tree, with one stem. That's the remains of an overgrown coppice. 

 

Since time immemorial, coppicing was used to force trees such as Hazel, Willow, and Sweet Chestnut to give up the single-stem "trunk" life, and go for the multi-stem style. 

The reason? 

To produce a crop - materials which can be cut and used for making fences ("hurdles"), for making charcoal, for weaving into baskets, for producing fodder, for using as firewood ("faggots" which are just bundles of twigs tied tightly together, much as we make newspaper "logs" these days), and for many other uses. 

There is no difference, between pollarding and coppicing, other than the height of the cut, and that depends on what product is needed, what species the tree is, and what animals are grazing in the area - because when a tree is coppiced, they produce a large number of tender new shoots the following spring, which are ripe for being eaten. 

So if there are deer in the area, the trees would be coppiced/pollarded at about head height. Cattle, same thing. Horses, they'd be cut higher, because horses have longer necks. Hazel tends to be done at ankle height because the coppices were often fenced against grazing animals, and cutting as low as possible made it easy to re-coppice them, as well as giving the longest possible new growth.

Hazel coppice is usually done on a 7-year cycle, a Hazel woodland would be divided into seven parts, and every year, one section, in rotation, was coppiced. This ensured a steady flow of material, year after year, and gave the plants time to grow back to the required size before being cut again.

We do this in the garden as well, usually annually: Dogwoods (Cornus) with bright winter-colour stems look best if they are coppiced - cut down annually to ankle or knee height. This allows them to produce a new batch of long, straight stems every year, which have great colour the following winter. 

Un-coppiced Dogwoods are usually sad brown gnarly things with a small outer fringe of bright colour, so it's well worth undertaking a regular hard prune of them.

And when I say "hard prune", this is what I mean - left: this is a red-stemmed Dogwood (Cornus) which I prune back to practically nothing, every year, usually in late Feb or March, before they start sprouting.

(Side note: this year, after the weird weather we've been having lately, I would not be surprised to find them already in flower by then!)

Every year, it rewards me by pushing out a mass of new growth, which is leafy and fluffy all through the summer, then in autumn, the leaves drop, and the stems take on their winter colour.

You could almost say that we pollard our Wisteria: to get the best flowers, we cut them back really hard every year, to a framework of the oldest wood, and in effect, that's pollarding, as is the annual Buddleia slaughtering: as with the Dogwoods, it prevents them getting too big, getting too gnarly, and getting top-heavy. 

Another reason for pollarding - or coppicing - is to encourage the plant to produce better foliage. 

Many shrubs, and several trees (Eucalyptus, and Catalpa, and Paulownia for starters) produce enormous leaves, if they are pollarded: and this also has the benefit of bringing the foliage down to a height where we can see it, rather than it being wasted 40' up in the air.

A great example is the lovely Cotinus coggygria, or Smoke Bush, right: to get the best foliage from them, they should be cut back hard every year, and they suit the head-height pollarding as well. 

It has the added benefit that it stops them getting too large for the space, as well! 

I wrote about Cotinus pollarding at length, with pictures, so please feel free to head over to that article, for more information on how and when to pollard your garden shrubs.

 

And there you have it: pollarding and coppicing are indeed the same thing, just occurring at different heights: they are a specialised pruning method, formerly used to produce a crop, but these days, mostly used to keep garden shrubs (and trees) to a reasonable size, or to force them to produce extravagant foliage for our delight!

 

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