Dan Hussey

Coppicing is an ancient form of woodland management which, because of the variety of habitats in woods, is beneficial to wildlife.

The market for traditional chair designs is flooded with cheap reproduction not made from coppiced or even English wood. Ten years of development have gone into my best selling chair, No 1. and it is made almost entirely out of coppiced ash. This chair is made by steam bending green ash, sourced from carefully managed woodland in Suffolk.

Coppiced ash is ideal for bending and well know for its strength and springiness. The timber is harvested in the winter months and in the spring new shoots will appear from the tree stumps, known as "stools". These slender shoots will become heavy ash poles, six to eight inches diameter after twenty years.

For the first few years the new growth is protected from grazing deer, by a brush wood fence built up around the area that has just been cut. If the coppice is divided into twenty areas, then one area is cut each year and the supply of timber never runs out. The coppice contains trees of various ages providing the diverse growing conditions necessary for many different plants and habitats for wild life. A tree starved of sunlight grows slowly and in ash this produces weak timber unsuitable for bending. By cutting the wood at twenty years this solves the problem of the trees becoming over crowded. The small size of the logs also means a minimum of damage to the woods when they are extracted. The log has to be split with a Froe before being worked into the required size for bending. The wood must be in its green state when bent to prevent internal stresses. The drying out of the chair parts takes about one month. Each component is cut of the log in a particular way so that it will shrink and change in a predictable manner as it dries. The steamer, which runs off shavings and sawdust, heats up the chair parts in a wooden steam box for one hour, before bending.