it is really hard to give you any help.. w/o a picture...

to restate what i believe you said.. you topped your plant after planting by one half.. and are now complaining that it is responding exponentially with erratic growth ???

frankly.. i never cut a plant for the first 2 or 3 years after transplant..

also .. this is a plant that is best served with rejuvenation pruning .... rather than cutting at height .... which results.. well.. in erratic growth at height ... been there done that ...

i googled coppice continuous and cant come up with a picture of what i thought you were looking for ... are you trying to turn this into a single truck tree???? what is your goal??? please explain by what you mean by 'coppice '

how about a pic

good luck

ken

Here is a link that might be useful: look for gardengals answer

Ken, let me reword the question for you.

The plant was a "standard" when I bought it - a single 3' tall trunk with many branches coming off the top.

A year later, in the winter, I cut all the branches (not the trunk) in half, per recommendations I read online.

This resulted in a mess. I want to a) move the plant and b) alter it's form from being a standard (single trunk) to a shrub (multi-trunked/bushy effect)

Coppicing is commonly done to cotinus and other species - you cut the plant down to the ground annually and it responds with strong bushy growth in spring.

I want to know if anyone has coppiced a *standard* cotinus, and if I can *move* the plant at the same time or not.

Does that make sense now? I was not "complaining that it is responding exponentially with erratic growth" - I was asking if my desired fixes will work or not.

I do not have any pictures.

thanks
Annie

"I cut all the branches (not the trunk) in half, per recommendations I read online."

Well, whoever gave you that advice should be hit in the head (or some other appropriate place) repeatedly.

"I want to know if anyone has coppiced a *standard* cotinus, and if I can *move* the plant at the same time or not. "

If the tree is healthy, you could transplant and coppice at the same time, but I wouldn't. I would transplant it now, give it a year to get established, and then coppice it. Removing all of the top growth will significantly slow establishment and could make the plant more susceptible to various pest/disease problems.

What you did was pollarding. It's traditionally used on willows to intentionally produce a lot of long thin branches for practical purposes such as basketry.

Is it possible that your standard Cotinus was one variety grafted onto another at 3'? If so coppicing would produce growth from the stock, not from the grafted variety.

Xanthora,
Transplant it as soon as the leaves fall off NOW.
This gives all the fall and winter for it to root in.
You are in zone 9. Border line for this plant.
Then, in February, before the leaves come out,
CUT THE STEMS above the main trunk ALL THE WAY DOWN.
THat is coppicing.
You will have a trunk and then it will come up and there will be NO branches at all. Just stubs.
In my opinion, I would not standard a smoke bush.
I have seen them at nursery's, and I am sure they use
a smaller variety to do this, but still, I wouldn't have done it.
Do this every spring before the leaves form and it should look gorgeous. It will put all of it's energy into growing stems and leaves instead of blooming.
My smoke bushes would bloom anyway, and have the nice color display.
Don't ever cut a smoke bush by half. It will look terrible.
Coppicing is cutting a shrub all the way TO THE FRAME.
Not to the ground. (you can cut to ground with smoke bush).
Hope it looks good for you in the spring!

butterfly4u - I beg to differ. Coppicing IS cutting right to the ground. Not to the frame. It is a method of producing multiple stems from the base of a woody plant.
Cutting back to the top of the trunk is pollarding and cutting back to a frame is just that, cutting back to a frame. I don't think it has a technical name.

Here is a link that might be useful: Definition of coppicing

I've been involved in horticulture and arboriculture for a long time and don't think I have never heard the term "frame" used. I'm not sure what it would refer to, so am uncertain of its meaning here. But, I also wouldn't call coppicing "cutting all the way to the ground". It's kind of relative, I guess, but as Flora's link shows, coppicing is most often done so that a stool is left (cut near the ground, but not really all the way to the ground). Maybe I'm being too technical, but I'm not sure exactly what was meant in some places above.

Maybe 'frame' is non-technical but I think I understand what is meant by it. However, 'coppicing' has a definite meaning. By all the way to the ground I mean flush or a few inches above, as in the pictures on wiki. Certainly, it means cut below any branches and results in stumps at or near ground level. The commonest coppice in the UK is hazel but there is coppiced ash in some parts of England which is over a thousand years old and the trees seem to be able to go on almost indefinitely under this form of management.