Hedges: laying, layering and pleaching

I've been out enjoying the sunshine, helping my friend Rich with some work in a bit of woodland near ours, cutting roadside trees and recreating a hedge there. We also had the help of Tom for a bit, another friend of mine. Here's the work site:

The tree cutting was all pretty straightforward, with the main challenge being the phone line the trees had grown round. But use of a long pole with saw or loppers on the end made it pretty easy.

Rich showed us how to 'layer' a tree to fill in gaps in the hedge. This starts with a stem, which is cut most of the way through, making sure to leave both some bark and some sap wood - this allows the rest of the stem to stay alive. Rich used an axe to cut through the stem, though for a larger stem you could start with a chainsaw. This bit of the process is known as 'pleaching', and the cut stem is sometimes called a pleacher.

The idea is to cut it thin enough that the stem can be bent over to touch the ground. The bark needs to be scraped off the underside of the bit that will touch the ground:

You then scrape out a small hole, and put the pleached stem into it:

The stem is held in the ground by a wooden peg - in this case made from part of a forked stem:

This is banged into the ground with whatever tool is nearest - an axe in this case:

This leaves the pleached stem securely fixed in the ground - where the bark was scraped off new roots will grow.

Finally you just cover it back over with some earth and leaves, and leave it to get on with it. As well as roots growing out of the scraped sections, shoots will also grow out of the side of the stem, as with a cut coppice stool. The idea is that after a period of time the bit of wood joining the pleached stem to the original tree dies off, leaving you a new independent tree (a clone of the original one).

We also pleached some stems that weren't fixed into the ground - this is 'laying' a hedge, meaning that the stems are laid over on their sides. Again, new shoots will grow vertically from the stem, but in this case enough wood is left attaching it to the main tree that it will continue to be fed by it permanently:

Here's the section cut so far - there's about the same amount again still to do:

Mike

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Cutting an overgrown Holly hedge, and making some new place mats

For the last few Saturdays we've been working where Sweep Wood borders a neighbour's garden. There are border trees there which probably used to be a hedge at some point in the past, but are very overgrown now. Our neighbour would like a view from their house across the wood, we need to cut the trees at some point anyway, and right now their garden is just empty soil as it's being redone. So we've taken the opportunity for fell some trees into the garden, rather than into the regrowing coppice from our work there in 2009/10.

Here's a pic from a week ago, when we'd cleared a gap and started to move brash back over the fence to make a dead hedge:

We've had lots of brash to cut up, as Holly always seems to be very bushy!

There's some fairly chunky stems in there:

And we're getting plenty of nice heavy logs out of them!

At the end of last Saturday we'd created a view like this:

Today we went to carry on with the trees at the left...

Again, plenty of decent Holly logs in there, which will be great in a year or two for keeping the fire in overnight - Holly is very dense and so burns slowly.

If you were wondering why I'd felled the one above so high, it's because it had ancient barbed wire embedded in it, and I didn't want to blunt the chain on my chainsaw by hitting it!

There's now a decent gap in the overgrown hedge there:

Though at either end are a few trees we'd still like to deal with before Spring arrives:

Here's the pile of logs we have to move at some point - I already did one trailer load when it was snowing a few weeks ago.

One last thing - what do you think Tracy is carrying here?

Answer - our new set of placemats!

They're slices cut from a Holly tree that had some kind of fungal infection. We found this once before, in a Sycamore, and the mats we made are still in use at home. Just in the time it took to get home, the Holly had already changed colour, taking on a more greenish hue:

Tomorrow we'll coat them with PVA glue to stop them drying too fast and splitting, and then store them in the shed for a year or so. Then they'll be ready to bring indoors and use!

Mike

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