Hedges (Focus - November)

At this time of year hedges are looking at their best, as far as fruit is concerned. The winter storms and hedge cutting haven’t bashed it away, and the birds and animals haven’t started in earnest.

Following this summer’s wetter than normal weather, there is a good crop of rosehips, crab apples, and berries on blackthorn, spindle, hawthorn, wayfaring tree, guelder rose, rowan, elder and buckthorn. This (incomplete) list shows how important it is to plant a whole range of species when planting a hedge. Ancient hedges can have many more species than more recently planted ones, where the predominant species is often hawthorn, as it is cheap to buy and stock proof.

Last winter, no hedges, except those by the roadside, were cut on Wallmead Farm, because it was too wet to get any tractors into the fields without creating mud and ruts for months and the damage would be too much to remedy easily. 

Over the years, I have learnt that cutting should be as late as possible, and certainly not before Christmas, to let the birds and animals have time to eat their fill. Conservation subsidies help with the cost of hedge cutting if it is only done every second or third year, so that is what I have done too. The reason for this is that the flowering and therefore the fruit only happens on growth that is older than a year old. Yearly cutting results in no fruit at all.

When a tall and wide hedge is cut back, the result can look awful! With a flail (which all hedge cutters are) large stems are torn with a jagged edge and the hedge looks as if it has been mauled, a sight which I am sure is familiar to you all. The hedge does recover when spring comes and new shoots appear.

Before hedge cutters (going back 50 years or more), most hedges would have been laid on a rotation of about 15 years; hedges were radically thinned, and the remaining stems were cut at the base halfway through and bent to about 45 degrees to form an impenetrable barrier. 

This essentially is the advice to follow from The People’s Trust for Endangered Species, who have done research on this subject: to cut each two or three years gently, so it increases in height and width slowly, and then to lay it once every 15-20 years. There is a subsidy to help pay for this very slow and expensive job. 

​Peter Shallcross