Ash has been coppiced in Britain for centuries, cut on rotations of fifteen to twenty-five years to produce straight poles for tool handles, gates, hurdles and firewood. Ash dieback, caused by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, has changed all that. But coppice has one great advantage: a stool is a large, established root system with many buds, and even when the crown collapses, many stools push up fresh regrowth. Some of it grows away strongly for years before succumbing. So don't write off a wood at the first walk round. Survey it, decide which stools are worth keeping, and plan the work from there.
Late July to September is the best window, when crown symptoms are clearest and you can see the full picture before autumn leaf fall confuses things. Walk every ride and compartment, and score the crown dieback on each stool:
Look low as well as high. Dark, diamond-shaped lesions often appear at the stem base and around the stool, and these tell you more about a tree's future than the crown alone. Tag survivors with a numbered disc and a dab of paint at chest height, and mark them on a sketch map or phone map. Photograph the best. Survey annually — a stool that looks fine this year may collapse in three. A notebook and a pencil are perfectly adequate kit.
Dying ash becomes brittle quickly, and branches or whole stems can snap without warning. You cannot make every tree safe, so concentrate on targets: footpaths, bridleways, rides, boundaries, parking areas and buildings. Inspect trees within a drop zone of two to four metres either side of a path, and remove or reduce anything that could reach people.
For large stems near targets, bring in a qualified tree surgeon with the right insurance. A splitting, leaning ash of forty centimetres diameter is not a job for a ladder and optimism. Check before you start whether a felling licence is needed, and whether Tree Preservation Orders or conservation area consents apply — the rules differ across the UK, so ask your local authority or forestry authority first. Where a dead tree can safely be left standing, leave it: standing dead ash is superb habitat for beetles, fungi and woodpeckers. Just be honest about the risk, and never leave a hung-up stem.
A small proportion of ash — often a few per cent — show tolerance to the disease. These are the trees that will seed the next generation. Mark them, do not cut them, and let them stand. Protect their seedlings and any natural regeneration from deer and rabbits with fencing or individual guards; without protection, browsing will wipe out your best hope.
Where stools die, replant with a mixture rather than a monoculture. Good companions for ash coppice include hazel, field maple, small-leaved lime, oak, hornbeam, wild cherry, birch, rowan and crab apple. Diversity spreads the risk. Where ash regrowth is vigorous, thin it back to the best two or three shoots per stool and grow them on — you may still get a usable crop. Keep some ash in the mix. The species will not vanish, and the wood is too good to lose.
Wood from dying ash is not waste, it is a crop, and it can pay for the work. Pole-sized ash cleaves beautifully for tool handles, gate hurdles and besom handles. Larger material makes furniture timber, charcoal and excellent firewood. Process what you can on site with a shave horse and drawknife; green woodcraft is one of the great pleasures of managing coppice, and a well-run firewood round can cover the cost of the safe felling and the replanting.
Brash earns its keep too. Laid into dead hedges along boundaries, it keeps stock and people where they should be, shelters wildlife and saves burning. Smaller material stacked into habitat piles beside rides will be full of invertebrates within a season.
Keep records: which stools you cut, which you kept, how the survivors perform, where you replanted and what survived. Revisit the same marked trees each year so you can see the trend rather than guess it.
Consider retrenching ancient stools rather than coppicing them hard, and pollarding a few stems instead of cutting them at ground level — old stools respond better to gentle treatment. Adjust your rotation, accept that the wood will look different for a generation, and aim for a mixed coppice with ash as a component rather than a pure crop. Patience is the coppice worker's oldest tool, and it has never been more useful than now.
The Greenwood Journal shares practical, down-to-earth guidance on traditional coppicing, woodland management and green woodcraft in the uk. for readers across the UK.
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