Cut and come again

Easily identified by their gnarled silhouettes, pollarded trees can be found all over the country. Charles Quest-Ritson looks into the history and origins of this ancient method of tree management

- Charles Quest-Ritson

POLLARDING is an ancient skill. It involves removing much of the upper part of a tree. The purpose is to make it safe, keep it at a pre-determined height or induce it to grow in a more useful way. Most frequently, the practice means cutting the tree severely back to a stump, typically 5ft or 6ft from the ground. It responds with thick new growth of leaves and branches. Once you start to notice pollarded trees, you find that they are many more than you supposed.

British planning authorities use the word 'pollarding' to describe the high pruning of established trees. The limbs of a beech in danger of dropping its branches may, therefore, be cut back at as high as 40ft to lighten the tree's load and reduce its vulnerability to wind. The correct word for this method of thinning the canopy is 'lopping'.

Pollarding is not the same as coppicing, which requires a tree to be cut back to ground level. Hazels, for example, may be coppiced to renew their growth and ensure that their nuts can easily be gathered. Until recently, the hard-pruned stems were used for wattle-and-daub construction work. Pollarding is a similar technique, but the cuts are made higher up the trunk, so animals such as deer and cattle cannot eat the fresh young growths.

In traditional societies, those fresh young growths are the main purpose of pollarding -the leafy, soft stems are cut to feed domestic animals. It is still an integral part of stock-raising in much of Africa and Asia, especially in such arid areas as the southern edges of the Sahara. Anthropologists tell us that some two-thirds of all African tree species-6,000 of them-may be pollarded to feed livestock.