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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

I came here to mention coppicing as well. In medieval Europe forests were highly managed or farmed, and this technique produced a steady source of straight poles that were used in various diameters.

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Can you point me towards anyone using pollarding or coppicing to produce lumber? That's not at all what I was taught those techniques are for. It's hard to imagine the resulting shoots getting big enough to make boards out of in a reasonable amount of time.

Mainly used for fencing. Either poles, or the fence itself woven from smaller branches.

Think furniture legs, tool handles, spears, bows and arrows, wooden spoons, knives and cups and so on. The bark was of interest for the tannin. The wood was also used for generating charcoal and tar.

That makes sense. I knew you could generate wood for fuel in this manner. I think I got my wires crossed and thought I was replying to a comment that suggested it was a form of lumber production. Lumber in my mind, and according to Wikipedia because I had to double check myself, is wood that can be milled into boards, which I couldn't imagine being produced from a pollarded tree.

Once you see coppicing it's one of those things you'll notice everywhere that was cultivated for a long period of time. I'm surprised at how straight the shoots would grow, and farmers were pretty good at managing and multiplying timber using this method.

I just responded to a sibling pointed out that Rome records pollarding for at least 2100 years, but pollard and coppice are also critical to First Nations crafts in the new world as well. I think the only reason it dates to 100 BC in Rome is due to the limitations of recorded history, not a lack of imagination.

I'd place reasonable odds that coppice/pollard are older than the written word. In fact this is probably middle stone age technology. How many decent spears can you make without pollarding? Let alone arrows, which you would need ten times as many of...

Since Japan appears to have already had long bows before recorded history, it's probably more accurate to say this particular variant of pollarding in Japan dates back 600 years, and is tuned specifically for creating posts (and beams?) which are defining elements of Japanese architecture. Pollard is great for making spears and staves, good for making fences (up to and including the posts), but not so great for making houses.

According to the article it sounds like Japan used these in roofs and rafters, rather than as main structural elements of a building.

Maybe we’re splitting hairs or I’m using my construction terms wrong, but I would include “roof timbers” loosely under the category of “beams”.

Perhaps my sense of scale was off in the pictures, but I could easily see poles that size used for secondary beams.

I just have never seen a pollarded tree that produced large enough shoots to be called a pole. A pole in my mind is 4-5" in diameter. Everything I can find says pollarded trees were used to produce fuel and small diameter wood for crafts.

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