A Celebration of Our Woodland

My name is Chris Wilmoth and I manage a coppice woodland on Exmoor. My mission is to re-position woodland as the beating heart of a regenerative economy as it once was. To do this I’m coppicing and planting trees for the production of fuel, tools, food, clothing and housing. 

Chris Wilmoth amongst some willow

Woodlands can amazingly meet every human need. They are the only growing system in Britain that can do this from my view. And whilst other growing systems are needed to holistically meet all our needs, I think we should be growing more of it.

My family's woodland

One of the greatest gifts I have received through woodland management is an appreciation for planning for the long-term. Even in coppice management which deals with shorter cycles than conventional Forestry, I’m still thinking 21 years into the future about what to grow. It makes me excited about the future.

Because in 21 years’ time the woodland will reward my work with produce from every type of tree, every year including Blackthorn, Italian Alder, Sweet Chestnut, Small-Leaved Lime, English Oak, Sessile Oak, Wild Cherry, Willow and Silver Birch. I think that if everyone in our society were involved in the management of woodland on a regular basis, that better decision-making would permeate our society with a greater number of decisions benefiting future generations, the climate and biodiversity.

I love coppice management in particular as through it I’m mimicking the great megafauna of old which would have bashed through woodland creating glades. The British landscape would have been a mosaic of woodland and pasture as a result with lots of edges (ecotones) which creates more niches for biodiversity, allowing it to explode. Coppice management reflects this by creating a glade (coup) every year in a cycle and where trees regrow over a number of years to reform the canopy. This practice produces an abundance of regenerative produce, whilst allowing light into the understory, enabling plants and insects to emerge that then feed a variety of animals, beast and bird. 

Palaeoartistic Reconstructions of Last Interglacial landscapes in the European Temperate Forest Biome (which included all of our current species at their current stage of evolution)

Many of the trees co-evolved with the megafauna. Hazels for example live to 80 on their own undisturbed and to 300 through coppice management. It's really healthy for them. It’s like giving them a haircut, removing avenues for decay, that then become deadwood on the forest floor feeding fungi and insects.

In the place of the megafauna it falls to us to steward these woodlands until such a day that large herbivores are allowed to return. Though as Keystone Species we also have gifts that only we can offer. We can use fire to make Terra Preta, which when fed to the soil creates a virtuous cycle increasing abundance whilst minimising tree disease. We can traverse seeds many thousands of miles, adapting the land to climate change. We can read the patterns of plant and tree and bring those with symbioses closer together. And we can compost our manure, completing the cycle by feeding our food back to the earth with seeds entrapped within that germinate plants and trees anew.

If we own these gifts and make full use of them, I’m confident that we and the ecosystems we sit within will become resilient enough to weather the many crises and coming storms.