Coppicing & supports

I have thought more about structures and boundaries than I ever thought possible. With dramatic decisiveness, the whole hazel hedge along the south side of the field was coppiced to the ground. It involved a chainsaw and a lot of noise but it was disproportionately satisfying. The light flooded in and I was left with a range of shapes and sizes for tunnels, domes, teepees and pea sticks. You don’t have to go to this extreme, but I would suggest thinking about it soon. Firstly, because the plants that make the best plant supports (willow, hazel, cornus) are at the perfect time for coppicing or pollarding and they aren’t covered in leaves, which also helps. Secondly, if you wait until the summer when your plants are flopping all over the place and you are reactive rather than proactive, you will have a nightmare of a time trying to wrestle the plants into the supports, or by tying in already flopping plants, you break them at the base. Thirdly, the softness of the soil. I am a lazy gardener and I find persistence tricky. All of my arches and tunnels have fallen over because I do not give them enough of a foundation. The taller the structure, the more of the stick has to be below the ground. It is not an easy job to push a thick stick into clay soil, even if you have made a bit of a hole already. But you know what is even harder? Pushing a stick into baked, hard, dry soil after a hot spell at the end of May. Yes, that is the voice of experience talking.

I have left my hazel a year longer than I should have done and many of the stems resemble trunks, rather than the whippy, bendable material that one needs for true hazel domes. One of my guiding life principles is to make a feature out of my failures and so I will be building some rather robust looking structures this year.