When to start coppicing
Coppicing & Pollarding
Hello, my name is David Mattern from Chanticleer garden and I'm gonna talk a little bit
today about coppicing and pollarding. So coppicing and pollarding is a pruning
technique to cutting a woody shrub or tree down to the ground to encourage new whippy growth.
So coppicing is pruning all the way down at the ground level and pollarding is
leaving a bit of a stem and cutting back to that stem every year so this is an
example of pollarding in the garden this is Cotinus coggygria Golden Spirit
With the new growth having that nice chartreuse foliage so pollarding you can
have you have a certain level trunk it can be any size it can be single or
also multiple trunks this one's multi trunked. I'm pruning it at
the height of the wall to kind of keep it in scale you'll often see that a lot
in the landscape and in the garden for the reason for coppicing and pollarding
is to kind of keep things in scale with the garden. So what I'm doing here is I
will prune all of the new growth back to the the stumps every winter so in the
wintertime it's just part of our winter pruning regime and you can see all the
new growth that's starting to come out now in the spring. So this is an example
of coppicing in the garden that we do is this is another Cotinus, it's Cotinus coggygria
‘Royal Purple’ with the purple foliage to it so this hasn't been cut
back in the wintertime but typically what we'll do is we'll cut it back to
the ground every year and this is last year's new growth so Carla's letting
this reshoot up so you have more of the architecture in the height but you can
cut it completely to the ground but what you can see is that the base it starts to
get sort of that knobbly base from cutting it back every year and you can
already see the new growth is starting to arise from there typically again like
pollarding when you start to see the new growth coming up you kind of want to be
a little selective about it selectively pruning out some of those shoots I would
estimate personally about 25% of those out because you
nice architecture shoots coming out you don't want it to get a little too
crowded. Another tree that we have in the garden this is Catalpa bignonioides 'Aurea"
a bit of a tongue twister and 'Aurea" is the cultivar is known for
that chartreuse bright chartreuse foliage so down by the ponds Joe will
coppice this it's really combination of coppicing and pollarding because he'll
cut it at the base a few at the base and he'll cut you can see some of the cuts
here pollarding to get it to reflash every year. So one of the benefits to doing
that both in keeping these plants in scale but by coppicing or pollarding
these Catalpas it actually spurs the leaves to to grow a little bit bigger
they're in more of like a juvenile state the leaves get bigger the leaves get
brighter and so you have that effect of that bright golden foliage even more
over emphasized in the garden in contrast all the other plantings in the
garden. So in the vegetable garden here we are repurposing willow and cotinus
to create these waddles that make these raised beds in the garden it's a nice
way of repurposing that material because they're long shoots that emerge as a
result of pollarding and coppicing. So all this is is I just took the thicker
branches the bases of those pounded them into the ground on one foot increments
and then it's just a very simple basket weave just in and out in and out the
whole way you can use these for hurdles you can use them for raised beds which is
kind of like what I'm doing here or they can just be nice partitions
between beds and walking space but it's a fun way to repurpose a material that
you have in the garden that you're generating in
winter pruning and can kind of persist into the garden
so because of pollarding and coppicing it's usually one to two years worth of
growth it's not very strong so these will only last about one to two years in
the garden which is perfectly fine because I coppice this every year so I
always get fresh material so think about that that's another aspect of pollarding
and coppicing that can make it kind of fun and a little bit more dynamic in
your own garden
