Coppice or Pollard: Maintaining Your Willow
The most colorful and malleable portion of a willow is the new growth. Basket weavers for example seek out fine one-year growth for their endeavors. We can encourage more and more (and more!) of that growth through the act of coppicing or pollarding.
Here we’ll briefly explore two methods of keeping your willow patch beautiful, productive, and most importantly manageable. Nothing I’m able to write will be as informative as the material I’ll have linked at the bottom of the page so be sure to check them out! For our purposes here we’re focusing only on willow.
What happens when you prune a willow?
Anyone who has experience with willow will tell you that they’re fighters. In fact, that trait is what makes them so desirable. More on their role in nature can be found here: A Willow’s Place. As part of their natural habit, they shed limbs. This damage will often trigger a burst of new growth. We can stimulate this same reaction really anywhere on a willow with a pair of pruners! It’s even beneficial! Remember to wait to do any of this ’til the leaves drop and the plant is dormant.
You gonna explain what the heck a coppice is?
Not to be confused with bovine waste, to coppice (cop·pice) a willow is the act of cutting it down to just about ground-level. This allows you to form a “stool” in which new growth manifests. Annual/bi-annual pruning at this place further develops the stool, which in turns encourages more new growth.
To begin forming a coppiced stool: after your willow is established (2-3 growing seasons), using clean tools, cut the main stem as close to where it comes out of the original cutting, which should be securely rooted by now. In the following years this process can be repeated but be sure to avoid cutting in to the stool as it can inhibit future growth and introduce disease/pests.
Now tell me what a pollard is or the willow gets it!
A pollard (pol·lard) is when you cut anywhere above ground-level. There are a few names for the growth that forms but I like boll so I’ll use that. A boll forms much like a stool, through annual/bi-annual maintenance. The book Coppice Agroforestry states that pollarding is more difficult than coppicing, as some trees have a harder time adjusting and transporting the needed nutrients up a long length of trunk.
To begin forming a pollarded boll: after your first growing season select the strongest, most upright stem and prune the rest away. Continue to favor this stem until it’s a little taller than your desired height then (once dormant!) cut above a bud node. New growth will form at this site.
Our anecdotes
We have a lot of experience with coppiced willows here at the nursery. It’s true, they do respond very well to it. I wouldn’t have believed that a coppiced willow can grow rods up to 12 ft in a single growing season until I saw it for myself. We believe that annual coppicing gives the planting a ~15 year lifespan, but have been told this can be done for over 100 years on a single stool if done properly. We’re learning that natives don’t take to annual pruning very well whereas non-natives like purpurea and miyabeana bounce right back.
As our nurseries expand, we expect to shift away from coppicing and to pollarding. One of the big reasons for this is so that we can harvest in the Winter to achieve more timely shipping. Much of the nursery is pretty densely planted so stomping on stools is always a concern. Harvesting en masse on our hands and knees is also not terribly desirable as we advance in age either.
What works for you?
To get the most out of your investment some form of maintenance will be required. Coppicing or pollarding is not a decision to be made lightly and I highly recommend checking the sources below and more. There are pros and cons to each method but hopefully we’ve helped you to grease some of those brain-gears.
sources
Coppicing vs. Pollarding – Hanna van Aelst – Hanna also has inspirational youtube videos, with one on this very subject. Check it out!
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