A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1186 entries
thicket
A thicket is a dense stand of shrubs and young trees grown so close together that it cannot easily be walked through. It forms where light reaches the ground and nothing is grazing: an abandoned field, a woodland gap, a fenced-off bank. It is a stage rather than a destination, and left alone the stronger stems shade out the rest and it becomes woodland.
Etymology
The word is Old English, a diminutive of thick, so a thicket is simply a small thick place. English has a set of words for this kind of ground and they are not interchangeable: a copse is cut on a rotation, a spinney is a small wood of thorns, a shaw is a strip along a boundary, a bosk is a clump, and a brake is a thicket of bracken or scrub.
Notes
Thicket is the habitat that carries the most nesting birds per acre in temperate country because it offers cover at exactly the height a small bird needs and because nothing large can get into it. Nightingales, warblers, and a long list of others depend on it, and its scarcity in modern landscapes is a management problem rather than a natural one, since it needs a period of neglect to exist at all.