The effectiveness of willow poles for shallow slope failure stabilisation

Mike G Winter1, Ian M Nettleton2, Richard Seddon3, Jan Marsden4

Work to evaluate the effectiveness of innovative geotechnical repair techniques for slopes was commissioned
by Highways England. The techniques are the planting of live willow poles, Fibre Reinforced Soil (FRS) and
Electrokinetic Geosynthetics (EKG). These techniques were used in place of conventional approaches in order
to reduce the overall impact of various challenges including environmental constraints (habitat and visual),
access and utility constraints, and the need to reduce the scale and/or cost of traffic management and delays.

Trials of these techniques have been undertaken over the last 20 years or so, but monitoring was generally
limited to just a few years post-construction. Longer term evaluation has not generally been undertaken. This
work assesses the effectiveness of live willow poles as an aid to increased stability.

The use of vegetation as an aid to slope stability has been widely written about and the associated benefits
are often described as follows:

Root reinforcement as the root structure develops, which will enhance the initial reinforcement
provided by the willow poles.
Canopy interception of rainfall and subsequent evaporation.
Increased root water uptake of the water that does infiltrate into the soil and subsequent transpiration
via the leaf cover.
Trials at the A10 Hoddesdon, M1 J12 Toddington, A5 Milton Keynes and M23 Gatwick have been assessed.
It seems clear that, although monitoring was undertaken only in the relatively short-term, the planting of live
willow poles has been beneficial in terms of promoting the type of changes and behaviours in the soil that
would be expected and that would be beneficial from the point of view of reducing instability.

In addition to the trial sites a practical application of willow poles to stabilise a slope was examined at the M6
South of J40 (Figure 1). At this site inclinometer readings were taken before, during and after the willow poles
were installed. Progressive downslope movements of up to around 50mm were evident during a period of
around 570 days before and during construction. In the 540 days post-construction these movements largely
stopped and/or were reversed.

The success of both the trials and the practical application of willow poles led directly to the development of
design guidance and specification information which can be found along with a much more expansive
treatment of this work by Winter et al. (2018a). Lessons learned from the trials and practical application will be
incorporated into that design guidance and specification in due course.
Specific challenges related to willow pole trials and the future use of willow poles include:

the selection of appropriate willow species including in the light of climate change and in consultation
with statutory bodies and appropriate professionals,
construction issues related to the installation of the poles and the fitment of appropriate tree guards,
design and construction costs,
the types of monitoring that have proven to be useful,
maintenance issues, particularly the need to ensure that the willows are appropriately coppiced, and
that competing vegetation is eradicated during the period of establishment,
future uses for willow pole coppicing products, and
the need for a long-term end-of-life strategy for willows to allow for, for example, succession planting.
More generic lessons learnt from the trials and the practical application are reported and these were combined
with those from the work on FRS (Seddon et al. 2018) and EKG (Nettleton et al. 2018) to produce guidance
for future Highways England trials of innovative geotechnical repair techniques (Winter et al. 2018b).

REFERENCES