4.3 Agrarian
4.3.1 Spinney
4.3.2 Coppice
4.3.3 Hedgerows
4.3.4 Plantations
4.3.1 Spinney
Almost all agricultural land if abandoned turns into woodland. Let a field be abandoned - as many fields have been down the centuries - and within a year it will be invaded by oaks springing up from acorns dropped by passing jays, or by birches from wind-blown seed. Within five years it will be an impenetrable mass of thorny shrubs and spindly tree samplings.  In ten years it will be difficult to reclaim; in thirty years it will have 'tumbled down to woodland'. When in the scrubby stages a site that is dominated by  thorny shrubs, sallow willows, and small trees is termed a spinney.  The same happens to chalk downs, heaths, fens, and some moorland whenever the grazing and burning cease that had held trees in check.

Woodland formed in this way, by a process of  termed succession, are categorised as secondary woods.  Succession is defined as the sequential change in species composition from grasses being the dominant ground cover to the final stages where little can grow under the dense tree canopy.  Animals, particularly birds and insects, also succeed each other in a sequence that is dependent on the botanical changes.  In the first years the process involves rapid year on year changes in biodiversity which slows as the site comes closer to woodland, but secondary woods never seem to gain many of the herbaceous plants of ancient woodland.  In general, the trees in secondary woods are not the same as ancient woods; they are composed of those pioneer trees- oak, birch, hawthorn, ash - which easily invade vacant ground. Ancient hornbeam-woods have recent oakwoods alongside them; only after a century or more does hornbeam get into a secondary wood, and lime may never colonize.  Secondary woods may be of any age from prehistory onwards.

Secondary woodland is familiar on railway land and old quarries; it covers about a sixth of Surrey; its spread is a chief threat to the conservation of heath and old grassland. In the eastern United States an area much greater than the whole British Isles has tumbled down to woodland since 1800. 

There have been many scientific studies of the subject, including the classic experiment of Broadbalk Wilderness at Rothamsted (Herts), an arable field which was left untouched after 1882 and had become a wood by 1914.  Recent writers, ignoring all these examples, call for expensive tree-planting as if it were the only way to create new woodland. Like all gradual changes which cost nothing, succession to woodland often goes unnoticed.
Wet and wildness
An Abandoned Field at Halesworth
 
graphic
Subtle almost beyond thought are these dim colours,
The mixed, the all-including, the pervasive,
Earth's own delightful livery, banqueting
The eye with dimness that includes all brightness
 
Ruth Pitter; Dun-Colour
graphic
In my beginning is my end.  In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
T. S. Eliot; East Coker
 
 
graphic
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
 
Gerard Manley Hopkins; Inversnaid
graphic
What profit hath a man of all his labour
Which he taketh under under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh:
But the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down,
And hasteth to his place where he arose.
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north;
It whirleth about continually,
And the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full;
Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return.
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
And that which is done is that which shall be done:
And there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?
It hath been hear already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things;
Neither shall there be any remembrance
Of things that are to come
With those that shall come after.
Ecclesiastes; 3-11
4.3.2 Coppice
Almost all woods in Britain, though of natural origin, have been managed, often intensively, for centuries. (The exceptions are a few very inaccessible groves on cliffs, and some woods of recent origin.) The following is the normal practice of woodmanship over most of England.
Woodmen traditionally make use of the self-renewing power of trees. As all gardeners know, some trees such as pines can be got rid of by cutting them down, but nearly all native species grow again either from the stump or from the root system. Ash and wych- elm, for instance, coppice:the stump sends up shoots and becomes a stool from which an indefinite succession of crops of poles can be cut at intervals of years. Aspen, cherry, and most elms sucker: the stump normally dies but the root system remains alive indefinitely and sends up successive crops of poles, forming a patch of genetically identical trees called a clone.
Coppicing and suckering are efficient and reliable ways of getting a new crop. Sallow can grow at 2 inches a day, reaching 11 feet high in the first season after felling; even oak can stand 7 feet high and an inch thick after one summer's growth. Such shoots, though largely immune from rabbits and hares which destroy slower-growing seedlings, are a favourite food of cattle, sheep, and deer; and in places where these animals could not be fenced out it was the practice instead to pollard trees in order to get a crop. Pollards are cut at between 6 and 15 feet above ground, leaving a permanent trunk called a boiling (to rhyme with 'rolling'), which sprouts in the same way as a coppice stool but out of reach of livestock. Pollarding is much more laborious than coppicing, and is typical of wood-pasture and some non-woodland trees e.g. in hedgerows, but not of the interiors of woods.
The trees of a wood are divided into timber trees (a minority) and underwood. Every so often an area of underwood, called a panel, cant, or hag, is felled and allowed to grow again by coppicing or suckering. Scattered among the underwood are the timber trees, which are allowed to stand for several cycles of regrowth and are felled when full-grown. Timber trees are usually replaced by seedlings. The whole wood is demarcated from its surroundings by an earthwork called a woodbankwith a ditch on its outer side, traditionally set with a hedge to keep out livestock and with pollard trees at intervals to define the legal boundary.
The wood therefore yields two products, timber from the trunks of the timber trees, and wood from coppice stools or suckers (plus the branches of felled timber trees). Timber and wood had different uses and are not to be confused; we still talk of 'timber' buildings and 'wood' fires. Wood is rods, poles, and logs, used for fencing, wattlework, and many specialized purposes but in large quantities for fuel. Timber is the stuff of beams and planks and is too valuable (and too big) to burn. Underwood was normally the more important product; woods were traditionally regarded as sources of energy.
Woods do not cease to exist through being felled.Popular writers suppose that a wood gets 'exhausted' as if it were a coal-mine or a pine plantation. Not so: a wood is self- renewing, and is no more destroyed by being cut down than a meadow is destroyed by cutting a crop of hay. The Bradfield Woods have been cut down at least seventy times and show no sign of disappearing. Woods cease to exist through being deliberately destroyed (in order to use the land for something else), through misuse (especially long- continued grazing), or occasionally through natural encroachment of sand-dunes or blanket-peat. When a wood disappears one should not ask 'Why was it cut down?' - for all old woods have been cut down from time to time - but 'Why did it not grow again?'.
4.3.3 Hedgerows
There are three ways that hedges have been produced.

Hedge-planting is familiar and well documented; nearly all more ecent hedges have certainly been planted. .

Hedges also arise whenever a ditch, bank, lynchet, or earthen wall is neglected for a few years not too far from a source of tree seed; a hedge will result. Fences turn to hedges by birds sitting and dropping seeds; the fence protects the incipient hedge.

Hedges arise in a third way as the ghosts of woods that have been grubbed out leaving their edges as field boundaries. The marginal trees, often already forming a hedge to protect the wood's interior, may be left as a hedge having woodland, rather than hedgerow, characteristics.

There are three hypotheses to account for the observation that older hedges have more species:

1. A hedge acquires further species as it gets older. Tree and shrub seeds are constantly being brought by chance and birds. They germinate and occasionally get established.

2. In earlier times it was the custom to plant hedges with more species than later. Enclosure Act hedges were generally planted with one species only, usually hawthorn. As with other fashions, it is not easy to determine why, but the large scale and commercial character of the operation encouraged simplicity. Georgian enclosers usually planted hedgerow trees; after the felling of the original trees the regrowth of the stumps gives the hedge a second species. Victorian enclosers often omitted the trees. Pre-Georgian hedges were often planted with two or more species.

3  The older a hedge, the more likely it is to be natural rather than planted, and therefore to be mixed from the start.  Both kinds of natural hedge- ghosts of woodland boundaries and accidental hedges springing from the base of fences- are unlikely to be specifically documented; but conditions for them to arise have probably been much less rare in the past than they are now.
4.3.4 Plantations
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