Changing with the seasons
A hedgerow’s hidden treasures alter throughout the year – you never know what you might find.
fifth of the current hedgerows in southern Britain existing since Saxon times. It seems very likely that when the Romans first arrived in Britain, they would have marched past hedgerows.
In many places, the hedgerows that we see now are actual remnants of ancient woodlands and, as such, boast species such as honeysuckle, bramble and dog violet that were there when hedge and field first emerged from the wood. There are vestigial remains of other long-lost habitats found in other hedgerows: once-common agricultural weeds such as field poppy, common knapweed and meadow cranesbill now find themselves pushed into the margins by herbicides and so take refuge in these field boundaries, along with the woodland remnants. Hedgerows close to the sea are peppered with cliff-edge plants, while on chalk downland there are refugees from chalk meadows. Everywhere you go, you'll find hedgerows acting as havens for plants from once-common habitats.
Showing their age
An ancient hedgerow will be filled with different species, indicative of its woodland origins. Each era’s hedgerows have their own signifiers, but the accepted method of ageing a hedgerow involves selecting a 10m stretch and counting the number of woody species within it (not including climbers). Each species equals 100 years, so a hedgerow containing field maple, blackthorn, hazel and crab apple can be aged at around 400 years old. But even if you are not in the surveying mood, sometimes a simple glance will reveal great age: the presence of bluebells and spindle, for instance, is a sign that you’re looking at a very old hedgerow indeed, perhaps around 800 years old.
These complex and ancient hedgerows are most common along the western fringe and the south-east of Britain, and in any parts that are too hilly and craggy for largescale agriculture. Here, the pattern of the countryside is still much as it would have been hundreds of years ago. Fields are small and higgledy-piggledy, with hedgerows that dip and wind, often with sunken green lanes or ‘holloways’ running between them.
Meanwhile, in the flat and more central parts of England, hedgerows were
deliberately planted during ‘the enclosures’, when open field systems that had been communally worked by the rural population were made into private fields, a process that happened piecemeal from the 12th century onwards but picked up pace in the 1700s and 1800s. This changed the whole culture of the countryside from one where the majority undertook subsistence farming, to one split into landowners and workers. It heralded a time of great tumult in the countryside, creating a huge number of ‘rural poor’ with no access to land and no way to provide for themselves, and was one of the drivers for the mass exodus from the countryside to the cities during the Industrial Revolution.
Hawthorn was the plant of choice for these fields, and those who had previously had rights to work the common land to raise their own crops were often the people who were paid to plant them, essentially being employed once in order to lock themselves out forever. Hawthorn was chosen because it is dense, thorny and animal- and humanproof once fully grown, which was possibly considered more important by the new landowners than its beautiful display of May flowers – which see hedgerows exploding in a great froth of white – or, indeed, its brilliant usefulness for wildlife.
Fields such as these are more likely to be large and flat, and the hedgerows long and straight. These hedgerows have grown in complexity over the hundreds of years since they were planted – as seedlings have found their way in – but are still dominated by hawthorn and are not as varied as those derived from ancient woodland.
Bed and board
Across Britain, we have been left with the legacy of a vast network of hedges, which now act as important wildlife corridors, allowing smaller mammals to move around between feeding and nesting sites without crossing expanses of open fields where they would be in danger of predation from larger animals or birds of prey.
As well as helping mammals on the move, a hedgerow is also the perfect base for a great number of our wildlife, providing shelter, safety and nesting sites. In winter, creatures can burrow down into the bank below and hibernate, while in summer, some make small nests in the branches. Hedgehogs, common shrews, weasels, wood mice, harvest mice, bank voles, field voles and more all use the safety of the hedgerow to create their homes, partly because of the protective qualities of all that shrubby growth, but also because hedgerows are a great source of nuts, berries, seeds and even – in the case of the rare hazel dormouse – flowers to eat.
Around 80 per cent of British woodland birds are also supported by hedgerows and many more make use of them. In spring, they are breeding spots for robins, song thrushes, long-tailed tits, dunnocks and lesser whitethroats, while in winter they provide holly and hawthorn berries for
migratory birds such as redwings, fieldfares and song thrushes. And it is not just the berries that keep them well fed. Hedgerows are full of insects, ladybirds overwintering in nooks and crannies, aphids smothered over new growth, moths cocooning, and leaf miners tunnelling through the greenery, not to mention the bees and the butterflies that make use of all of the pollen-laden flowers.
Being uprooted
Clearly hedgerows are wonderfully rich and diverse habitats, but despite this, there is massive pressure on them, and they are being grubbed up all the time. As agriculture has intensified, monocultures have become the norm and farm machinery has grown larger. Fields have increased in size, and that has meant removing hedgerows. Pressure on land for development has also seen many hedgerows lost. Last spring, there was an outcry against the practice of developers ‘netting’ hedgerows to prevent birds from nesting in them and to allow them to be legally grubbed up.
Some hedgerows are protected by law but, despite this, it has been estimated that nearly 13,000km are lost every year and, in addition, many are managed badly. Some are left uncared for and become overgrown, and so turn slowly into a row of trees with no bushy sheltering undergrowth. And far more are cut with flail cutters, too close or at the wrong time of year, so that plants are ripped up by the root, and flowers don’t have a chance to set seed.
Our hedgerows are such a precious part of our natural and cultural heritage that we must treasure and protect them. Considering they’re often thought of as ‘just boundaries and edges’ – something to hold things in and keep things out – they are really pretty special.
LIA LEENDERTZ is the author of The Almanac: a Seasonal Guide to 2020, out now.
FIND OUT MORE Our guide to hedgerows: discoverwildlife.com/hedgerowspecies