Every spring, I coppice my trio of
purple smokebushes (Cotinus coggygria 'Royal
Purple') because I value the deep purple foliage
more than the ethereal flowers. I coppiced lots of
different kinds of shrubs for clients over the years,
always with ornamental aims in mind. However,
I've never pollarded a tree and it had struck me
as a strange horticultural folly or quirk, but that
was my own ignorance showing—ignorance of
the fact that pollarding and coppicing have been
used since the last ice age to generate woody
sprouts for a stunning array of human uses.
Arborist and NYBG faculty member William Bryant
Logan wrote a book, Sprout Lands (W.W. Norton &
Company, 2019), that explores how foundational
to human prosperity these practices have been.
Yes, it's a whole book about coppicing and pol-
larding, and it's riveting. That's what you'd expect
from the author of three acclaimed books: Air: The
Restless Shaper of the World, Oak: The Frame of
Civilization, and Dirt: the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth,
the latter of which was made into a documentary.
Logan traveled to California, England, Spain, and
Japan to learn about coppicing and pollarding for
the benefit of his Brooklyn-based company, Urban
Arborists, Inc. Among their NYC charges are 40
young, nursery-pollarded London planes (Platanus
x acerifolia) planted outside the Metropolitan >>
Pollarding v. Topping
From Columbia, Missouri Natural
Resources Supervisor Brett O'Brien:
Pollarding is a touchy subject for
some tree people, because many of
us have been taught for years that
topping is bad—so instinctively, pol-
larding feels wrong. Furthermore,
here in the Midwest, tree topping
is sometimes called "pollarding"
by its practitioners to give their
type of destructive pruning legit-
imacy. But pollarding has a long,
proud history in Europe and is not
the same as topping. A good dis-
cussion of the differences between
the two can be found here.
Air, Dirt, and Oak, other books by Willliam Bryant Logan.
www.urban-forestry.com 35
