Hazel coppice has been used to hold British riverbanks together for the better part of a thousand years. The technique is simple: chestnut posts driven deep, hazel rods woven between them, the whole structure backfilled and seeded.
The result is a bank that breathes — invertebrates colonise the woven wall within weeks, native flora takes root through it within a season, and within five years the structure becomes the bank itself.
We choose hazel over imported geotextiles for one reason: when the structure eventually decays, it gives back to the very habitat it was built to protect.
