Hedging Your Bets

What a wonderful substance is wood. Its source is a host of diverse living organisms which take root where they can and grow silently into beautiful and graceful structures, many times larger than us, soaking up our carbon dioxide emissions, releasing oxygen, providing us with shelter when it rains and shade when it shines. A myriad other beings, insects, birds and mammals also find their sustenance and homes within these natural edifices that we call trees.

The many broadleaved varieties that are native to these shores have a kind of zest for life not shared by their conifer cousins, in that if you hack one down but neglect to pull all its roots out of the earth, it will grow back! Not as a single big trunk of course, but with lots of small shoots rising from the stump that given enough time will each become a big trunk. Hazel and willow are particularly renowned for producing wonderfully straight rods that can be snipped off and used for any purpose you can think of. (My runner bean frames are partly made from my own hazel rods, as well as salvaged wild bamboo).

A hedge is just a row of small trees planted close together, their branches growing into one another to form an impenetrable barrier. You need to keep on top of it or it'll grow into an unmanageable mess quite quickly. I've occasionally been delayed when driving down narrow country lanes by a very slow tractor wielding a hedge-cutting attachment like a demented claw, savagely shearing back the hedge on one side.

A more natural and environmental approach is, of course, to “lay” it by hand. Not just hands - you need a saw or bilhook too. A broadleaved hedge produces new growth at various points, each one a small sapling which given enough years will become a proper tree in its own right. To lay a hedge is to hack the base of each of these small trees, a three-quarters cut diagonally downwards, then bending it over completely horizontally. Provided its tip is kept slightly higher than the cut, the sap will still rise and it will continue to live.

Do this with all the new growth, weaving them amongst each other as they're laid horizontal, stuffing back in anything that has been cut off completely, and you have yourself a well-laid hedge, pleasing to the eye.

How do I know this? Because yesterday we were laying the hedge next to Pilsdon's church, my first experience of hedge-laying. It took a small group of us all morning to do a third of it but in our defence we were nearly all complete beginners, it was covered in brambles and hadn't been laid for at least four years so there were some thick saplings in there! The satisfaction was worth all our scratches.