I was in my early twenties when I first realised how much hedges matter. The realisation landed thanks to Graham Denny, a Suffolk farmer living on the old road to Norwich, who took me out onto his land to show me what a hedge ought to look like.
Anybody who has ever caught a train across England will have seen countless miles of hedgerow, though most of them will have been wispy and thin. In part that’s due to deer damage, but it’s also because most hedges in this country are no longer managed – rather than being ‘laid’ every 15 years or so, they are simply left to their own devices. Hedges are great for wildlife, like the grey partridge, but there is actually nothing wild about them. They have all been planted by man and, for quality and longevity, they should really be maintained by hedgelayers.
It was high summer when I visited Graham. He farms in an old fashioned sort of way and the scenery and soundscape reflect that. He has cattle and sheep, every field has a pond in it, and there are still nightingales and turtledoves in his hedges, which have mostly disappeared elsewhere in England. Graham told me that to really understand what a hedge ought to be, I shouldn’t just look at it, I needed to actually climb inside. As I did so, he reeled off a list of the constituent plants: “Ash, hazel, bramble, spindleberry, dog rose, old man's beard, buckthorn, blackthorn.” It was as though he was a druid reciting an incantation. “That hedge is as much as 20 metres-wide across,” he continued, as I pulled myself through the great tangled thicket.
The hedges on Graham’s land are extraordinary. It’s taken time for them to become as good for nature as they are, and that work has been lovingly carried out by people like my friend Richard Negus, a professional hedgelayer who lives very near Graham in Suffolk. It wasn’t long after Graham took me to see his hedges that I first saw Richard in action. I remember him explaining, as he worked away, that people have all of a sudden realised how important hedges are for conservation. Richard has laid hedges for over two decades and he does so with an expert instinctiveness. He grabbed a twist of blackthorn, cut three quarters through with his billhook (a sharp agricultural tool, not unlike a sickle) and then laid the cut part of the stem (known as a pleacher) at an angle and carried on along the hedge. This partial cutting (which is always done in winter, when the sap isn’t running) encourages new growth and rejuvenation.
A skilled professional like Richard can lay as much as 40 metres of hedge in a day. When a hedgelayer is done, they drive stakes into the ground along the length of the hedge and then weave hazel ‘binders’ between the newly cut stems, which creates a framework that the newly-laid hedge can grow up around, becoming in time like one of the extraordinarily thick hedges on Graham Denny’s farm. If you can see through a hedge to the other side, it is not providing the conservation benefit it ought to be. The point of a thick hedge, according to Richard, is that it provides shelter and safety for wildlife, allowing them to travel through a habitat without breaking cover. It gives them a place to nest too, and it also, in the form of berries and insects that live in hedges, provides food.
In a time before fences, hedges were laid to create a barrier for cattle and sheep – the conservation benefit was merely a happy consequence. These days, a man like Richard (one of only three professional hedgelayers working in Suffolk) must persuade landowners to pay him not for the sake of their cattle, but for the likes of the grey partridge, which has declined by over 90% in Britain in the past 50 years. As farming becomes ever more intensive, the hedge becomes ever more important as a place for nature to escape.
On Britain’s sporting estates, the hedge is essential for partridges. Simon Owen, the headkeeper on the Walsingham Estate in Norfolk, and previously a gamekeeper at Sandringham, explained that at Sandringham, they would maintain some hedges at double the size of standard hedges, to increase the wildlife habitat benefits.
These hedges, maintained through laying, trace a storied ribbon of life and vitality through the English countryside.