The Full Monty

Changes are afoot in the hazel coppice at Longmeadow - Monty reveals the reasons behind this bold step and outlines his new vision for this area

- 

Back in the spring of 1994, I noticed that all over the Spring Garden, which I had begun to plant the year before, hazel seedlings were popping up.

These were from nuts that had been buried by squirrels from the big hazel tree just beyond the back door. So I dug them up and potted them. Across the next couple of years I accrued about 70 of them, so decided to plant them out and make a small hazel coppice as part of the transformation of Longmeadow from a grassy field to a garden.

I grew up in North Hampshire with coppices of hazel with beech standards as the dominant woodland, and have loved them and their attendant flora ever since. The essence of any coppice is that it is cut back to the ground on a regular cycle, which in the case of hazel is between 7 and 12 years. This floods the area with light and stimulates a flush of flowers before the multi-stemmed hazel grows back, creating increasing shade but also increasing cover for wildlife. It is a beautifully sustainable ecosystem.

It took a few years for my little hazels to establish, but 30 years later they have been coppiced three times and provided us with hundreds of bean sticks and, for a while at least, the ground was carpeted with primroses and bluebells in spring.