Gardens
Earthly immortality
Ursula Buchan
We came upon the place quite by chance. We were staying in the Lake Dis- trict and had planned to walk up Me11- break, one of the finest of the Western Fells, which gives its name to the oldest pack of fell foxhounds. As it turned out, the clouds were so low and thick, and the rain so insistent, that we were forced to stay quite low, and close to the head of Crummock Water. Which is why we found ourselves walking along a broad path, lined on both sides by an elevated ditch and `hedge' of coppiced ash 'stools' and sur- rounded by open pasture. These stools were plainly of great antiquity yet they had the vigour of saplings. Although I am theo- retically aware of the astonishing powers of regeneration possessed by plants, I have never seen those powers quite so starkly demonstrated.
Many of these stools were several feet across, covered in moss, and hollowed out by decay; yet, from a point two feet or so above the ground, there rose from the shat- tered stumps ramrod-straight branches, as thick as a child's arm, and in full, generous leaf (this was early October). So empty and cavernous were these stumps that, in places, it scarcely seemed possible that suf- ficient continuous threads of phloem and xylem could exist under the bark to feed and water those vigorous ash poles.
I discovered later that these coppiced ash hedges were common once upon a time: carters and travellers would cut down branches as fodder for horses as they passed by, and there was always a demand for ash as firewood. In fact, in the Middle Ages poor men often risked a day in the stocks by stealing hedge wood. Whatever the reasons for this particular avenue's existence, it was a marvellous sight, made more marvellous by the knowledge that coppicing had been carried on here every few years for a very long time, continuing even into our own day.
As Dr Oliver Rackham, the great chroni- cler of trees and woodland, has written:
A tree does not have a predetermined life- span as we do ... [coppice stools] are com- pletely self-renewing and capable of living indefinitely as long as they are not overshad- owed by timber trees.
In other words, they have the potential to be immortal. He goes on:
An old stool spreads, without loss of vigour, into a ring of living tissue with a hollow cen- tre and often an interrupted circumference.
He cites examples of ash stools on wet sites taking 300 years to reach two feet in diam- eter. It was not too fanciful to think, there- fore, that these ash had been planted in mediaeval times.
You may wonder what all this has to do with gardening. That's easy. There are a number of good garden plants which will stand being cut back as hard as those ash, and respond by throwing up new and vigor- ous shoots. Almost all the native trees and shrubs will do it, of course, but there are some amenable exotics as well, like euca- lyptus, catalpa and cotinus.
The advantage of stooling a potentially large tree, such as a eucalyptus, by cutting the trunk to within two feet of the ground, is that such treatment makes it suitable for growing in a small garden. What is more, eucalypts are shockers for blowing over, if allowed to grow to their full height, so are inevitably more stable if grown as stools.
The juvenile leaves of eucalyptus differ from the adult ones (one of the few other examples of this is our native ivy). Coppic- ing Eucalyptus gunnii. and thereby keeping it young, ensures the continuance of the more interesting, rounded, juvenile leaves, so popular with flower arrangers.
Promoting interesting foliage is the other main reason for coppicing in the garden. The purple and yellow-leaved hazels (Coq- lus maxima Turpurea' and C. avellana `Aurea'), the purple-leaved forms of coti- nus (such as C. coggygria 'Royal Purple' and 'Grace% and the coloured-foliage ornamental elders (forms of Sambucus nigra and S. racemosa) can all be cut to about a foot from the ground in early spring and, if fed and mulched well, will send up strong shoots bearing larger leaves than is usual. This is because coppicing puts roots and crown out of balance, which the plant will naturally try to redress. There is the same amount of root pumping life into a much smaller crown, with the result that the leaves are larger, and may keep their colour for longer in the season.
It is not only a way to promote good `Where exactly are those erogenous zones of yours, then?' foliage; in the case of the shrubby dog- woods (forms of Cornus alba and C. stolonifera) this spring pruning encourages the growth of young stems which have the brightest bark colour. You can see these at their best now in 'winter borders' around the country, such as the famous ones at Cambridge Botanic Gardens. I don't sup- pose I shall look at them again, without reflecting that these apparently quite hum- ble life-forms have the theoretical potential for earthly immortality, a fate quite denied to more sophisticated beings, like our- selves.
Previous page
