hazel – Coppicing Suz

Split Hazel Baskets

Belated happy new year to all!

It’s been a slow start to the year with lots of time needed for resting and recovering from back to back bugs. But now the end of the month is here I’m back on track and ready to begin the year in earnest.

It’s not all been long naps and lemons and ginger tea, I have also been pottering away and making lots and lots of split hazel baskets.

The technique, historically popular in Wales, was shown to me over the summer and since then I’ve been hooked. Every part of the process is enjoyable and has a unique set of skills to learn.

Using a hazel rod to make a basket can be very efficient. Every part of the stick can be used to make different aspects of the basket such as the frame, the weavers and the ribs, so, apart from a pile of shavings, you’re not left with much waste. This is handy because suitable hazel rods for basket making are fairly old compared to their willow counterparts, which in my opinion, makes them a much more valuable resource.

The best sticks for making hazel baskets are the slow growing sunshoots that grow on overstood hazel (hazel growing under heavy canopy cover from other trees) and so these can be up to 10 years old even though they are the same width as a 4 year old rod grown in the sunlight. The thing to remember is that an overstood hazel tree needs its sunshoots, so to protect the tree from damage only one or two rods can be taken from each tree, and only if they have a few others to keep them going.

I’ve been working in miniture mostly so that I can save even more resources. This often means I can practice making a basket with just one rod. its more fiddly and takes a bit longer to prepare the material but they turn out well and look cute. The one issue with selling this kind of things is that because it is smaller customers assume it will be cheaper. This isn’t the case at all as it takes just as long to make a smaller one because of the fiddliness!

If you would like to know how to make a basket then I can highly recommend Lewis Goldwater and Zed Outdoors youtube video on how to make a split basket. It is a mega video at about 4 hours long but well worth a watch and has a timestamp in the description so you can go to a specific part.

Later this year I will be working with Ruth Pybus who is a master split hazel basket maker and also hope to display some of my baskets at the Oxfordshire Basket Makers annual basketry exhibition.

New homes for Baby Trees

Now that the coppicing has finished, the layering is complete and the standards have been felled it is time to introduce the baby hazel whips to their new homes.

Iain plants whips, alongside layering branches from existing stools, to increase stock density. At the moment, in this particular coup, the density is about 3m on average between each tree. Iain would like to get this down to 1m. Having trees growing this close together will push the hazel to grow faster and straighter as each stem reaches for the light. It will also manage the light that reaches the woodland floor, as after 3 or 4 years, after the hazel has grown tall enough to block out the light again, the woodland floor will start to become clear of brambles and this preps the ground for the upcoming cut. Once the hazel is coppiced the bramble free floor will give the flowers the warmth and light they need to germinate, and it will also be easier for the coppice workers during the coppicing.

Some people disagree that planting is a good idea. This is mostly due to the unknown origin of the whip and the possibility that it won’t be acclimatised for the area. Although the whips come from the UK they may come from very different climates. Some of the trees in this years coup for example didn’t loose their leaves until the middle of December. This suggests that the whips came from a more northern climate than their southern cousins and were still waiting for a colder cue to loose their leaves. This was slightly problematic when making pea sticks and faggots as these products are often requested without leaves and so required some vigorous waggling to remove them.

Best practice is to use the stock already present in the coup to ensure that the trees will be acclimatised to the microclimate and are certain to flourish that soil. It also reduces the chance of new diseases being introduced to the area. However, when you are restoring coppice and need to increase the stock density filling the spaces with layering would require using more of the stems that could be potential products and they may not even root.

So whips provide a quick way to increase density and so far, apart from last year perhaps because of the hot weather, Iain has had a good amount of success with the them.

It is also a lovely task to do and if these babies are looked after well they will still be growing in that very patch of land in hundreds of years time.

Getting my Craft On

wp-1536856631322..jpg — Hazel branches leaning away from an oak tree

One of the hard questions in coppicing is what to do with all the bits of hazel on a stool (that’s what the trunk that the new shoots grow from is called) that have grown all bendy.

Bendy rods (aka branches) can occur for a few reasons. It may be due to ‘browsing’ from wildlife such as deer. Muntjac deer are very common in the woods where we work and are a pain for coppicers. There are various ways that people use to stop the deer but the most effective it seems is building a huge blummin’ fence. My mentor and myself did speculate whether a stuffed lion or two might work well instead after I mentioned that my father used to be a taxidermist. If we try this I’ll let you know how it goes.

Another reason for bendy rods can be a lack of light. If the shoots have to compete for light with the standard trees (the trees that are left to grow to full size) then they’ll contort their way towards the light that is available. This can also slow growth which can lead to more twisty turny bits. A coppice works best without standards as the coppiced trees get the maximum amount of light but sometimes space is a premium and standards can provide firewood and also a more varied environment for wildlife. When standards are used/left they should only take up 40% of the canopy cover, leaving 60% of the sky still visible.

Anyway, I’ve digressed… Let’s talk about crafts!

Coppicers come up with many ingenious ideas for what to do with all the little bits of wood. Products such as whistles or pencils are popular as well as gypsy flowers and even little christmas decorations.

Over the last few months as I’ve been preparing for the apprenticeship I have also been wondering what I could make with all those little bits. I decided that, however bendy a rod, you can always make disks and a disk is a very useful shape indeed.

My inventions so far have included ‘tree hanging’, bracelets and bowels, all made partly from discs or small bits of sticks. I’m keen to use as much of the stuff we cut down – apart from whatever would be beneficial as habitat homes – and find as many uses as we can. My mentor is also keen on this practice. After drilling holes in some candle holders we decided that the shaving were too good to throw and thought about how they could be used (we decided perhaps some kind of delicate flower decoration).

The level of creativity in this is endless when your base material is the humble stick!