Lisa Standley’s Cottage Coppicing is the very definition of a beginning-to-end business.

She starts with a woodland thick with overgrowth, dense with hazel and studded with oak, ash and field maple, blackthorn, cherry and hawthorn. Welcome to Ladyhill Wood, the 9 acre patch of woodland which Torfaen Council asked her to manage back in 2011.

This was woodland which hadn’t been managed in 50 years or more, so if you’ve ever moved into a house where the garden has been left unloved for even a few years, you can imagine how this untouched patch of woodland among the houses would have looked.

So through a programme of winter coppicing, working mostly between January and April each year, Lisa has been able to tame the woodland over time, and bring back other native species to improve the biodiversity of the area. She now sees more in the way of wood anemones and lesser celandines, and is even visited by a woodpecker.

But once the coppicing is done, Lisa doesn’t just burn the wood, leave it to rot down or get it taken away. From the spring onward, she is to be found hard at work in her workshop turning these remains into stunning works of art.

I’m in awe of anyone who can not only look at the branch and see that it could be a four-storey house, complete with doorbell and balcony, but then have the skills to actually achieve that!

As a child who grew up on Enid Blyton’s stories of the Enchanted Wood – this is exactly what I had in my mind as the sort of thing you’d see around every corner!

Or, if you’re more of a nautical persuasion, then how about this waterfront property, which comes with its own boat – definitely worth a million on any property website!

The attention to detail in these works of art is just incredible to me – the oars of the boat and its bags of shopping, the handle on the door, the four identical pains in each window. Truly stunning.

And when it comes to Christmas, well, of course Lisa has you covered there too.

It’s really worth having a look at Lisa’s website at https://www.cottagecoppicing.co.uk/ to see what she’s up to. And if you fancy giving it a go yourself, or you’re already dabbling in working with wood, she also sells materials for other crafters – including the timber from her own tiny piece of South Wales.

From recruitment to woodland management – via Australia

Lisa didn’t start off in carpentry, or woodland management. She’s not come from a degree course in arboriculture or even (as far as I know) a GCSE in woodwork!

She originally worked in the recruitment industry – a far cry from what she’s doing now. She then moved with her husband to Australia for 4 years, and when she returned with her young family, started a business with her sister-in-law in pet-sitting and dog-walking. I didn’t want to say anything to her, but I wondered if that may not have been the best decision… as a couple of years later, she found herself unable to work as she recovered from a dog bite.

Whilst she was recovering, Lisa’s dad provided a couple of key moments of inspiration in her story.

Firstly, he had recently taken redundancy from his own job, and decided to put some of the redundancy package designed to help him re-train into learning about woodland management and green woodworking. As he learned, knowing that Lisa was unable to work, he asked if she would like to accompany him into the woods that he was now working on for Nature Resources Wales. She went with him, and was, by her own admission, immediately smitten.

The second key moment came when Lisa’s dad showed her the presents he’d made for her nephew – a set of crayons, made from the very woods that they were working in. “You have to make and sell these” she told him. But he was keener on moving toward retirement – and shrewdly offered to teach Lisa how to make them instead.

I think we can all agree that this was a good move…

Mentoring young people

Lisa was really generous with her time when we spoke. We talked about how her dad inspired her to get into both woodland management and the crafting of these items (clearly the talent runs in the family). And we spoke at some length about the process of coppicing, and how it fits into the landscape both now and back as far as the bronze age. This is definitely a topic for a longer article, so I’ll return to that shortly.

But I was also taken with how much Lisa has given back to her community. In the obvious ways – the improved woodland and habitat – but also in her work with young people too.

She had no experience of teaching, no knowledge of mentoring, no idea what she needed to do to inspire people who were disillusioned with the school system and the traditional route through education.

But she was, she says, “badgered into” working with local young people, worried about the safeguarding aspects, concerned for both their and her own safety – this is, after all, a working environment, with dangerous tools and real risks. And yet the fact that she now describes the mentoring of two local kids as being one of the most rewarding things she’s done speaks volumes about her openness to new experiences and her willingness to give of herself and learn from others as she teaches them.

She worked with them for a day per week for a year or more – and they’ve both taken the skills and inspiration that Lisa gave them and continued to work in carpentry and related areas. It’s such a shame, she told me, that the funding for the scheme has been cut, and Careers Wales is no longer able to place young people with her. It’s typical of her, however, that Lisa then started talking to local schools about whether she could help with work experience for their pupils, and has now applied for a grant to allow her to take on another student for another year.