78 The Plant-formation of Clays and Loams 



becomes very weedy or cakes hard and becomes almost 

 bare of vegetation. Under such conditions the natural 

 regeneration of the wood from self-sown seed is checked 

 or arrested, and unless the wood is properly taken in 

 hand it degenerates to scrub and grassland. Such woods 

 have often been extensively replanted with oak, ash and 

 hazel, and sometimes with conifers. As was pointed out 

 in the last chapter these oak-hazel copsewoods are not 

 now commercially remunerative^, though they are useful 

 as furnishing a source of small wood, and to some extent 

 of timber, for the local uses of the countryside, but their 

 main importance in the eyes of their latterday owners is 

 found in their use as pheasant-covers; the gamekeeper, 

 not the woodman, is the important guardian. 



The most abundant shrub of the coppice is the hazel 

 (Corylus Avellana), and in very many cases 

 the coppice consists almost wholly of this 

 plant. It is possible that the hazel was the dominant 

 member of the shrub-layer in the primitive oakwoods 

 from which the existing woods are derived, and it is 

 pretty certain it was very abundant. Thus in certain 

 fragments of uncoppiced woodland, supposed to represent 

 remains of the old oak-forest of the Weald, the hazel is 

 one of the commonest shrubs, though it is exceeded in 

 numbers by sloe and hawthorn ; but pure hazel coppice is 

 probably an indication of planting. Hazel is a particularly 

 good coppice shrub, making excellent and rapid growth 

 from the stools, and the coppice shoots are used for a great 

 variety of purposes. Among the coppice are found how- 

 ever various other species of shrub, such as sallow (Salix 

 caprea, 8. cinerea) and dogwood {Gornibs sanguinea), etc. 

 Oak is often an abundant constituent of the coppice, 

 as would be expected in copse derived from primitive 



' It is even stated to be doubtful if oak in any form can be grown 

 remuneratively in England in the present state of the market (Forbes, 

 The Development of British Forestry, 1910, p. 192). 



