DABBLING IN MANAGEMENT

Devon is famous for its hedges. It even has its own distinctive design, which takes its name from the county. A genuine Devon hedge is made by forming a wide soil bank, more than a metre high, stabilised with turf or stones on the outside.

Hedges are invaluable for wildlife. They support plants and animals in their own right. And they also provide connections between patches of woodland and scrub, offering food and shelter for animals in transit. Such connectivity is a vital element of the landscape as wild habitat continues to erode and fragment. If a species is lost from a small wood, perhaps through a run of poor breeding seasons or a hard winter, it can only return if it moves in from elsewhere. Hedges help with that, making it easier for animals to travel from one wood to another. Even some of our resident birds are reluctant to cross large areas of inhospitable open ground, preferring a safer route along strips of cover.

Our local network of hedges is managed, for better or for worse, by a small army of farmers and council workers. Once the bird breeding season is over in late summer (and sometimes a little before), they spill into the fields and lanes with their cutters and flails. The vegetation is trimmed back, often to just a few centimetres above the top of the earth bank. It looks drastic, and it removes the annual crop of nuts and berries before the birds can take full advantage. Ideally it would be left until later in the year, but winter rains and heavy soil make this difficult - the fields and verges become waterlogged in winter, and the heavy machinery used for hedge trimming these days would churn up the damp ground.

Thankfully, not all the hedges are trimmed each year, and those that are missed continue to feed wildlife through the winter. Some hedges have even succeeded in breaking free from the process. If they are missed for a few years, the woody stems reach up for the light and become too thick for the cutters. They are now safe from the annual trim, though they are on their way to becoming lines of trees rather than proper hedges. Therein lies the problem. Too much management, and there are no berries and the vegetation is so short that it provides limited food and shelter. Too little, and the hedge will cease to exist. Lines of trees are well worth having, of course, but they don’t offer the same amount of food, or cover for nest sites, as a well-managed hedgerow.

We are fortunate to have an old hedge running along the track to our house. It’s a proper Devon hedge, with a substantial soil bank about a metre high and two metres wide. It looks ancient, and as far as I can tell it has been around for several centuries at least. The rough and ready rule is that for each woody species present along a thirty-metre length, you can reckon on a century of elapsed time since planting. Ours has ten different species overall. Unable to resist bias, I picked the richest thirty­metre section and found that it held six species. So it is perhaps 600 years old, give or take.

In truth, it has been let go in the last few years. It’s away from the road so beyond the reach of the council’s machines. Our landlord seems happy to leave it to us to manage but, until now, we have done very little. It still looks fantastic, with tall, bushy growth, full of breeding birds in the spring, and no shortage of nuts and berries in the autumn. But, already, the stems are starting to reach upwards and it has become thinner towards the base. In short, it is beginning to stretch the definition of ‘hedge’. A few more years with no management and it will be a line of trees, with less food and less cover for wildlife.

It’s now early October, and the bird breeding season is done with once again. I’ve finally decided that it’s time to make my small contribution to the upkeep of our hedge - a few hours of work to add to the interventions by who knows how many individuals, stretching back through the generations. It’s also a chance to have a look at the effects of a little experimental tree felling that I’ve already carried out.

I clamber up the bank and into the heart of the structure, pursued doggedly by our boldest and most persistent hen. She is using me to help with foraging, looking for opportunities to snatch invertebrates that are disturbed as I push through the vegetation. I presume her distant ancestors, the Jungle Fowl of Asia, do much the same thing with large mammals in their native forests. Indeed, perhaps that was their first tentative step towards domestication.

I’m searching for stumps a few centimetres above the ground. Last winter I cut a few stems from each of the most common trees, to see how they would respond. I find now that the Grey Willow, Pedunculate Oak, Ash, Hazel and Downy Birch have all produced new growth. The willow is by far the most prolific, with new shoots up to two metres long after just one growing season. This fresh growth has helped to enrich the base of the hedge. In place of each bare tree stem, there are now up to six shoots, thick with leaves. The new Hazel shoots, as well as some of the older stems, remind me why this tree was once so highly valued. They grow remarkably straight and true as they head up towards the light, as if they have been made by machine and then somehow fixed into the stump. Not only are they straight but, much like willow, they are also pliable, so they can be woven together to make a substantial barrier. Here then, ready-made, is an abundance of perfectly formed stakes and poles for fencing, waiting to be harvested and put to good use.

It is thought that a tree’s ability to respond to cutting by rapidly sending up more shoots is an adaptation to damage by herbivores, especially species that are no longer with us. Over tens of thousands of years, small trees in Europe had to contend with long-forgotten beasts such as the Aurochs, Straight-tusked Elephant and Woolly Rhinoceros. The elephants in particular used their strength to break the trunks and branches of small trees so they could reach more of the foliage - as their relatives in Asia and Africa do to this day. An ability to regrow from a snapped-off stem would have been invaluable. So, a tree’s response to my small handsaw today is likely the result of pressure from an animal lost from the planet around 40,000 years ago.

These mega-beasts may also have influenced the defence mechanisms employed by trees. It has been suggested that the vicious, stiff thorns of trees such as Blackthorn are somewhat overengineered to prevent browsing by present-day herbivores. They are likely to have evolved in the company of tough-skinned elephants and rhinos, animals long since consigned to history.

The regrowth over the summer reassures me that further cutting will be worthwhile. It might not be as effective as tradi­tional hedge laying - which is beyond my capabilities - but it will help restore something of value to this hedge. As I labour, I set aside the largest of the stems for the log burner. They are only a few centimetres in diameter but will dry quickly and help eke out our dwindling log supply. It’s hot work with a handsaw. And I’m reminded of that old adage, passed down the family line to me from my grandfather, and no doubt others before him.

Trees help warm you up three times: when they are first cut down from the woods or hedges; again, when they are chopped into logs and stacked so they can dry out; and, of course, one final time when they are added to the fire.

As ever, I find this work is a good exercise in mental relaxation. Much talk of mindfulness in nature is about walking, looking and listening. Strolls in the countryside are fine for quiet reflection and mulling things over. Yet sometimes that is precisely what you are trying to get away from. Touch, I find, is a much more powerful sense when it comes to restraining an overactive mind. Delving into a hedge and grappling with the trees requires a certain amount of focus. The work itself is not difficult, but I’m careful to select stems that can be removed without resulting in obvious gaps, and where the hedge would benefit most from the thicker regrowth. Once I’ve chosen a stem, I need to get into a position where the saw can be used, pushing through brambles, and trying to dodge spines designed to repel elephants. Then there is the sawing itself, and making sure the tree falls on the right side of the hedge so it is easy to retrieve. Not a particularly challenging task, but just taxing enough to require my full presence in the heart of this rich and ancient hedge.

Of course, the great joy of having a hedge right beside the house is in watching the wildlife. In the breeding season it comes alive with birdsong, and provides nesting cover for many of the garden’s resident birds. In spring and autumn there are migrants to look out for. They won’t stay long but they drop in for a day or two to refuel before continuing their journey. If I have a spare half-hour, I sit on the wide windowsill in a bedroom upstairs, looking out along the hedge through the open window. In early autumn it is often packed with birds. Chiffchaffs are the most common migrant. They pump their tails up and down constantly and, typically, chase away any other small birds that venture too close - an oddly disproportionate behaviour for a creature that will soon be moving on. There are regular Blackcaps and the occasional red-letter day with a Brambling, Spotted Flycatcher, Redstart or Whinchat.

In October, as the leaves turn and begin to fall, this hedge is often the place that first reconnects me with returning Redwings and Fieldfares as they home in on the ripening berries. They will stay, or at least visit regularly, for as long as the food supply holds out, joined by Blackbirds, Song Thrushes and myriad garden regulars. For me, they are perhaps even more welcome than the first returning Swallows and House Martins of the spring. Here are two birds that flood into our countryside in the autumn, choosing to be with us at the start of difficult times, when so many others are fleeing.

The mammals are rather less obvious. I occasionally see a Weasel or Stoat, weaving frenetically through the grasses, and ducking into thicker cover if I try to get too close. I can sometimes get a Stoat to re-emerge by making a high-pitched squeaking sound. Curiosity gets the better of them and they peek out cautiously, hoping the noise might be from a wounded animal and an easy source of food.

Small bats patrol the hedge-line through the late summer evenings. When I’ve checked with the bat detector they have all been Common Pipistrelles. Bizarrely, we once found one at the bottom of a plastic bucket in the garage early one morning. How it ended up there is anyone’s guess. We also encountered a Brown Long-eared Bat resting in the corner of the garage one evening and guessed that it too would be making use of the hedge when foraging for moths, beetles and other large insects.

When we first moved in, I put up three wooden Dormouse boxes, attaching them to Hazel stems, tucked away within the hedge. They have not yet attracted the target species - but Blue Tits have used them for nesting, despite the hole facing inwards towards the tree, and another delightful mammal often reveals itself when I peek inside. Wood Mice stuff the boxes with dry leaves as bedding and lay in stores of Hazel nuts in case food becomes hard to find. They are agile animals, lightning fast, and sometimes leap clear of the box as I gently lift the lid. It’s difficult to be too disappointed, but one day I hope to find its rather less jumpy relative, perhaps an individual drawn in by the new shoots of life and the thicker cover. If that happens then my amateurish attempts at hedgerow management will have added something of great value to this place.