Blog | thebaumlab

Medieval woodland management. It’s not something that most people would think of as a go to for a modern life philosophy. As an undergraduate at University though, few other concepts had the same impact on me as did the wisdom behind this seven-hundred-year-old tradition. Life in the Middle Ages revolved around wood. Fuel for cooking and materials for furniture, utensils and buildings. Constant needs were accommodated by a two-tier cyclical planting regimen: the coppice, annually cut back to provide a steady growth of small scale, everyday use material; and the standards, large trees like ash, sycamore, sweet chestnut and oak, planted for a 30 to more than 90–year cycle to provide solid timb