The Forgotten(?) Art of Pollarding Trees

Topping trees to encourage growth has a bad name among tree fanciers like me. The conventional wisdom that it shortens the life of a shade tree has a lot of merit, but then again, don't we prune trees constantly?

As I do most of my heavy pruning in winter, especially late winter, I wanted to talk about a time-honored way of harvesting firewood without cutting down an entire tree. I've begun to practice it in my own woodlot. 

The photo above, from the Wikipedia entry on pollarding, shows a beech in Epping Forest, England. In the old world, where ancient forests long vanished, second-growth trees needed careful management to avoid vanishing. Legal rights to pollard a certain amount of wood were granted to locals.

Pollarding provides a safe and sustainable method, and carefully pollarded trees can live a very long time. The beech above has not been cut in a many decades, whereas a regularly pollarded tree will not produce the huge side branches shown.  For those working with willow for crafts, pollarding leads to a nigh-endless supply of material.

I use pollarding on our fence-lines, where gums, poplars, and other shade trees occur. Some I cut down to a stub 3  or 4 feet in height. The trunks get cut into small rounds for the woodstove, after seasoning a  year. The branches and twig I drag away to make brush-piles at the edge of the woods, to shelter wildlife. Sometimes I pollard very long stems to make beanpoles.

Pines, of course, cannot be pollarded, and once cut, do not return. I knew that but didn't know it as an ancient threat by Croesus from the Persian/Greek wars. Thanks, Herodotus.

If you burn wood in  your fire-pit, fireplace, or wood stove but live where you don't have a ready supply of large logs, you may want to begin pollarding trees. You might find it most handy for trees under power-lines as well. Keeping them short avoids the sort of awful slash/pruning power-companies often do to protect infrastructure. Pollarding provides a way to keep a tree like that gracefully shaped.

 

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Slow and Fiddly Hobbies, 2024

Back in 2017, I reported on my passion for "fiddly" and slow hobbies: mostly the solitary pursuits of building models, fishing, gardening, reloading my own ammo. It was a time of political disaster then, with a megalomaniac careening us unchecked toward a dark future, packing the courts so things he ruined could not easily be undone. It could happen again. I could have fled the country or gone mad, but instead I continued to find solace in slow hobbies and not living by the dopamine fixes and doom-scrolling provided by addictive smart phones. I grew up regarding golf as a hobby for old white rich people, but really, it would be a fine sport for me if it were more sustainable, environmentally.

Not long before that dark time of American dysfunction, a tremendously interesting series ran three seasons (in British parlance three series) on BBC Four, Detectorists. We don't watch TV beyond an hour weekly, but this one was so great that after streaming the first episode, we decided to buy the DVD. It's good enough to own, and hard enough to find to never, ever lend to others who might not return it.

We joke with others that we love "cottage porn," British TV that commemorates a simple rural life free of the hateful political stickers on clownishly lifted pickup-trucks now haunting America's countryside. Think of how twee All Creatures Great and Small is, as comforting as a mince pie. Detectorists, on the other hand, not only rejects escapism but moves its story to the present while adopting a wistful, resigned tone. The duo behind the detectors, Andy and Lance, are looking not just for metallic treasures under farmers' fields but for meaning. The show has a surprisingly existential bent, though not a lugubrious one. By adding gentle moments of humo(u)r, creator Mackenzie Crook manages the nigh-impossible; the characters' failures and modest successes remind me of the balance struck in the two excellent original Charlie Brown animated specials. Consider Linus' angst in the pumpkin patch, when the Great Pumpkin never arrives, or Charlie's moment of doubt and pain over an already-dead cut tree when he cries out, "I killed it."

Like the Peanuts characters, those in Detectorists do find solace, unlike Beckett characters or most of the Beat writers. Yet their regrets remain. That makes the show's comedy unique. One message? Bear adversity with a wry, even sardonic, sense of humor. Aside from a running gag about Simon and Garfunkel, the humor is sidelong. One sees the "Finds Table" with a carefully lettered but amateur sign at a meeting of the comically under-attended Danebury Metal Detecting Club, it's such an instance: pull tabs from beer cans, pence coins, old buttons and shell casings. Yet, sometimes, gold. It's still out there.

Rural life for more than 11 (!) years has taught me that thus philosophy works. I employ it when others tell me of their favorite "must see TV." Usually it's too silly for our cultural moment or so violent that it provides not even a slight respite from the news. Yet the philosophy of Detectorists, ultimately aligned with classical Stoicism, might work broadly beyond rural America, as we lose and find things in years ahead.

It's fine if you watch an episode and find it too slow, as some reviewers did when it ran. Slow is my favorite speed now.

I have yet to buy a metal detector, though we have talked about getting a pair of entry-level models to look for things on our property in Buckingham County. 

At least I will buy the DMMC T-shirt.