I've been intrigued by coppicing ever since I visited the ancient New Forest in England and saw huge trees that had been providing wood to the locals for hundreds of years.  The idea is simple --- certain trees resprout when they're cut, so you can cut off the shoots every five, ten, or twenty years and have a renewable source of wood without disturbing the forest.  Since I'd only read about coppicing in Europe, I was excited to hear Zev Friedman's information on which species can be coppiced in our neck of the woods.

The eight species that Zev considers worth coppicing in the southern Appalachians are black locust, mulberry, willow, basswood, tulip-tree, hazelnut, black cherry, and chestnut.  These trees not only resprout copiously, the bushy habit you get after coppicing has a benefit to the forest gardener.  For example, mulberries bear fruits on first year wood, so the fruiting area tends to move further and further out on the tree.  By coppicing, you keep the mulberries within reach, and can even coppice part of the tree each year so that you have young wood ready to bear fruit annually.

On the backyard scale, you're probably only going to have a few trees to coppice, but on the homestead scale you might set up an entire woodlot in what's known as "coppice with standards."  Standards are full-sized trees that are left alone and only cut every 75 to 150 years for timber, providing shade and livestock feed in the interim.  Oaks are a good choice for standards in our area (or perhaps walnuts or sycamores in damper areas?), and Zev recommends keeping 20 standards per acre.

Scattered amid the standards are the smaller trees that are coppiced much more regularly.  These coppiced trees are generally spaced 6 to 10 feet across on diagonal and provide firewood, fiber (mulberries), tender young leaves (basswood), mushroom logs (tulip-trees for oysters and oaks for shiitakes), and fruits or nuts.  We might try coppicing our mulberry tree and hazelnut bushes in a couple of years to see what kind of growth form results.