Jim Jones jokes that his Ontario hedge is probably the only one in the world to have been laid using black walnut. The tree is indigenous to North America; laid hedges are anything but native.
Although early European settlers brought their skills with them few of their hedges survive. There was a short-lived fashion for Midland-style hedges, as gentleman farmers transported a little bit of the enclosure era across the Atlantic, but theirs too are largely gone.
In Canada and the United States hedges can be anything from a shelter belt – such as the tens of thousands of Osage orange trees planted on the Great Plains in the dust bowl years of the 1930s and early 40s, to try to stem soil erosion – to scrubby fence lines, often turning into small, linear woods, or to stone boundary walls, frequently combined with trees and shrubs.
“You are very unlikely to come across a European-style hedgerow that has been laid in the traditional manner,” Jones told the recent Oxford Real Farming Conference.
But in North America there are the beginnings, or re-beginnings if you like, of an idea of having hedgerows in the landscape, partly driven by Jones’ Hedgelaying in the Ontario Landscape Project, which uses traditional crafts and skills to encourage a renewed sense of place and better stewardship of the natural world – to try to resurrect the all-important connection between people and land.
In the UK there should be that connection. Hedgerows somehow define much of our countryside, while our culture is awash with hedge stories, hedge imagery and folklore. We probably have the greatest density of hedges anywhere in the world, along with the largest reservoir of practitioners and skills. Yet our hedges are struggling.
Nigel Adams, a several times winner of DRST’s (Devon Rural Skills Trust) annual hedgelaying competition, indeed, he was one of the event’s founders, told the conference that few of the UK’s hedgerows were in good condition, only about 12% in the most intensively farmed arable areas. We seem to have forgotten a hedge is a living thing.
“A hedge that can give us so much has a life cycle and we must let that life cycle develop in order to keep it healthy,” Adams said. “We are rapidly learning that hedgerows are very important in our fight against climate change, they actually take in carbon, they store carbon.
“Hedges can only really do that effectively if they are healthy. Hedges don’t stay in the same condition, they will change, they get old, that is why we have to rejuvenate a hedge periodically.”
The UK’s Climate Change Committee, established by the Climate Change Act 2008, last year recommended a 40% increase in the extent of our hedgerows to help tackle the climate crisis, more recently Natural England has urged a 60% increase, to protect wildlife. The NFU now believes it would be useful if hedges were allowed to grow a bit bigger. May be the years of neglect and overzealous flailing are coming to an end?
As well as absorbing and storing carbon, hedgerows are the largest semi-natural habitat in the country – although, as we have seen, too few qualify as being in good condition, with the familiar dense tangle of woody stems, obviously bulky from bottom to top, and with occasional standard trees towering above. More than 80 conservation priority species in the UK would face decline if our hedges, some 500,000km of them, were allowed to deteriorate further, or, with a backward glance to the grubbing-up years, vanish.
Louis Dolmans farms in the southern Netherlands, on the floodplain of the river Rhine. His part of the Netherlands was historically densely hedged, right up until the 1920s, when, earlier than in most other countries, intensification began to render hedges redundant. It is now a landscape of vast, rectilinear fields without a hedge, and barely a tree to be seen.
Dolmans set out to change that on his farm. He told the conference: “In ten years we have transformed the almost sterile, ugly landscape into something incredible. We turned it into a densely-hedged landscape that can be characterised by huge biodiversity, indicated by a huge number of bird species.”
He has counted 59 different species – among them partridges, skylarks, linnets, little owls and yellow wagtails – including 17 on the Netherlands’ Red List of conservation concern. Visitors are transfixed by the landscape’s newly reclaimed beauty, and by the plants and animals to be seen.
The laid hedge was once a typical boundary feature throughout North West Europe, and the recent Dutch experience is salutary. Some 100,000km of the Netherlands’ hedges were lost as farming intensified, although the connection between people and hedges somehow survived. And from the 1970s onwards there has been a clamour to save the survivors and to plant new hedges – similar to our own experience, where interest has grown markedly in the last ten to 20 years.
For Dolmans, a lifelong birder, it is the wildlife he sees that tells him that he and his fellow hedge enthusiasts, in the Netherlands, in the UK, and elsewhere, are doing the right thing. “From my point of view a farm seeks for both economical and ecological profit. If birds do well so do many other lives, so it makes me happy if I can help my feathered friends.”
A sentiment that segues nicely into one of Nigel Adams’: “Perhaps they are the ultimate hedge fund, one which we should all invest in.”
A note on North American tree species mentioned in the text:
Black walnut (Juglans nigra): a native of the eastern parts of Canada and the United States and the most vigorous tree of the walnut family. In its native range it often grows as a weed on field, wood and road edges. Introduced to Europe c. 1630, it is an infrequent tree of parks and gardens in southern and eastern England. The wood is a deep brown colour, easily split and worked.
Osage orange (Maclura pomifera): native to parts of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas but now naturalised throughout the contiguous United States and parts of Canada. Similar but unrelated to hawthorn, it is in fact a member of the mulberry family. The ferociously-spiked Osage orange was widely used by settlers to make stock-proof barriers before the invention of barbed wire. A rarity in the UK, largely restricted to botanical collections. The wood is strong, flexible and durable, often used for tool handles and fence posts. Native Americans prized the wood for making bows.
(Written for the Spring 2021 issue of the Devon Rural Skills Trust’s members’ newsletter.)