Sloe motion
Plant a native hedge, such as blackthorn, to provide food for wildlife – and sloes for gin,
WHEN it comes to hedging, gardeners tend to choose the fast growers and there are three alien triffids growing within yards of my cottage. At the fast end is the Leyland conifer
(Cupressus × leylandii), which is capable of putting on 3ft (1m) a year once it’s established.
This is closely followed for speed of growth by the cherry laurel (Prunus
laurocerasus), a glossy evergreen that needs trimming three times a year in rain- sodden Gloucestershire. Finally, there’s the box honeysuckle (Lonicera nitida), which bends under a few inches of snow.
All three are hard work to keep in trim and are definitely not very wildlife friendly. However, if you planted a mixture of native hedging plants instead, it would only need a yearly trim after the birds have fledged.
Being native also means these hedges have a unique relationship with our fauna developed over millennia. Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa) is one of the best, and many will know this rather prickly beast as sloe. You can even make your own sloe gin from the blue fruit. This hedge plant is prompted into flower by cold temperatures, an event known as the blackthorn winter. The flowers are an invaluable source of nectar and pollen for early flying bees and the foliage is also the food plant for the caterpillars of many moths. These include the lackey, magpie, common emerald, small eggar, swallow-tailed and yellow-tailed. Birds nest among the dense, thorny blackthorn thickets, eat caterpillars and other insects from the leaves, and feast on the berries in autumn.
Blackthorn is also the principal food plant of brown hairstreak caterpillars, a priority species that’s in decline. I took part in a New Year’s Day egg search on Otmoor, a wetland area east of Oxfordshire that’s one of this caterpillar’s last bastions. I spotted two white eggs on the sunny side of a sloe hedge, about 3ft (1m) off the ground.
My granddaughter Ellie, who’s a mad-keen butterfly girl, went back to the same Otmoor hedge on the last day of August and saw some adults flying along the old Roman Road. I was very jealous! Brown hairstreaks only fly on warm, sunny days and rise late, so it’s best to go after midday. They can often be seen feeding on purple thistles.
Around the same time I wrote about a city garden on the Otmoor side of Oxford. The owner had chosen to plant some blackthorn in his garden in order to attract the brown hairstreak. He’d spotted eggs and the adult butterflies were on the wing in August this year. They’d also been seen in a cemetery near the John Radcliffe Hospital, close to the city of Oxford.
“Blackthorn is one of the best native hedges”