Singing the praises of hedgerows
Boundaries and barriers but also havens of wildlife and history, our hedgerows teem with life and lore in autumn. Discover their secrets with Nicola Chester
Hedgerows are the bias-binding, the strong, frilled and embellished seams holding our quintessential patchwork quilt together.
These intense, linear distillations of woodland edge have become vital connectors in an often hostile, difficult or exposed environment for wildlife – as well as travelators into our historical and cultural landscape. A hedgerow might be a 1,000-year-old remnant boundary, or a 200-year-old hawthorn hedge, parcelling up common land and prompting a rural ancestor to up sticks to the town. It could also be a new conservation hedge; a simulacrum of what has been lost, and a hopeful re-creation for the future. Hedgerows are places of quiet, ecological sanctuary and dynamism.
Where I live, great thick hedges tramp like woolly bear caterpillars across the rounded downlands. In autumn they are ablaze with the richest of colours – the lamplight glow of field maple, the licking flare of dogwood or elder, guelder rose berries like wet, glossy sweets (don’t eat them!), milk-pale cobnuts or storm-coloured sloes. Pouting-red rosehips can be gathered for an antiinflammatory syrup full of vitamin C while bramble briars arc high above, flicking like a driving whip in autumn winds, driving the season on.
A SENSUAL WORLD
Autumnal hedgerows are deeply sensory. You can often hear or smell ivy before you see it, as all manner of insects take a last meal before death or hibernation. The scent of the subtle flowers (an appley, attic-store smell of warm hay and old books) is accompanied by the roar of buzzing. And heaped at astonishing bright intervals are the lustrous, scarlet berries of black bryony, draped in great jewelled swags on clockwise twists of raffia, like looted necklaces ransacked from a theatre’s props department.
Veteran trees act as a kind of visual straining post for hedge corners or gateways and are great places to watch for navigating bats or a barn owl, floating past the tangled tenements of voles and mice. A sudden cold draught on the legs or hands can alert you to a gap in the hedge made by an animal: a snicket, a smeuse.
Other hedges are thin, sere, gap-toothed tombstones – victims of repetitive, savage hedgecutting with little chance to flower, be pollinated and bear fruit. In the weeks before redwings and fieldfares migrate in from Scandinavia, it is heartbreaking to find all the berries spilled, rolling and mulched on to the road. It must be a cold welcome.
This, along with neglect, close ploughing, nutrient over-enrichment or biocide spray-drift from some farming is now responsible for more hedgerow loss than outright removal. Although that still goes on.
VITAL HABITATS
Near me, a hedgerow was ripped out and replaced with metal fenceposts and electrified wire. It’s miserably hard to imagine anything less wildlifefriendly. Yet many more farmers practice and rejoice in good hedge management and must be thanked for their care and efforts.
Here are nesting opportunities, song posts, food and shelter for up to 80% of our woodland and farmland birds, such as whitethroat, yellowhammer, bullfinch and linnet, while nectar, berries, leaves and nuts provide food for invertebrates and mammals, such as voles, mice, shrews, hedgehogs, hares and rabbits, badgers and predators, including stoats, weasels and foxes. Associated ditches, walls and banks harbour frogs, toads, lizards and snakes. Here are the larval foodplants for pollinators, shelter for hibernators and entire life-cycles.
Maintaining a hedgerow takes time and effort but, as a living barrier, it lasts and rewards. A hedgerow reduces soil erosion, wind damage and water run-off, and encourages natural pest predation.
Hedgerows are the ecological putty between the tiles of farmed fields, domestic or industrial landscapes; they allow wildlife to travel, spread, link up and disperse and form a corridor, where we can hope to bump into it.