Hedging my bets #2

So having established that I have the wildlife habitat equivalent of the Mona Lisa around my garden and if I so much as touch it I shall have the wrath of a thousand hairy-bearded environmentalists raging about my head, I have had to work out how it is possible to garden alongside my hedge.

Just after a puny hedgetrimmer had been at it: not a shred of difference did it make (the tops were done with a flail: now that's more like it, but a little impractical inside the garden as the tractor wouldn't fit)

I have been weighing up a few options:

1. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with a wall.
Social suicide. I could never lift my head in polite society, and certainly not in the village, ever again. People have been sent to the Tower for less.

2. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with another hedge.
There is a precedent for this in the village: someone down the road from us has clearly ripped out their hedgerow and replaced it with a sort of cotoneaster sort of thing. It looks horrible: the essence of suburbia dropped like an alien into a rural idyll.

I have a lovely memory of the beautiful beech hedge I planted around my old house: but again, such clipped refinement would sit oddly among the wildness, and besides, it took years to establish, during which time the cows who live next door would have a high old time skipping around among my cabbages.

The inside of my hedge. Now in the process of returning to its former occupation as the outside of my hedge.

3. Make it a bit smaller.
Ah: now you're talking more sense. The main point of conflict between me and my hedge is that it's taking up too much of the garden. This is especially the case in my very thin vegetable garden: when you've only got about 20ft to play with anyway, an 8ft hedge either side reduces the available growing space to a wide path.

When you look more closely at the actual structure of the hedge, it's quite obvious that it's escaped from its original boundaries. The hump of chalk bank which my hedges stand on is hidden behind a forest of suckers: mainly hazel, but an awful lot of bramble and some blackthorn, too. There's a good few years' growth there in fact, and I got to thinking if this were a shrub, I'd be pitying it for being so neglected and working out how to renovate it back to its original shape.

In fact if you start thinking like that, you remember (something I bang on about quite a lot) that hedges are still plants. They need feeding, watering and weeding just like your other garden plants: and in this case, they also require rejuvenating.

So that's what I've been doing: it is a herculean task, involving a lot of heavy action with the loppers and pruning saw, and a pile of green waste which has just passed my head height across about two car's lengths of garden.

But I am uncovering a better hedge: a well-behaved hedge, one which is a bit gappy at the moment (despite still being about 4ft across) but looks as if it will this season have enough light and room to regenerate with new wood and fresh growth.

Looking back down the garden at the bit I just did: the darker area marks the original footprint of the hedge. As you can see, it is transforming the space: and, though it looks a bit rough at the moment, I hope it will transform the health of the hedge as well.

I get four feet of extra space each side of the garden, and my grassy path of a veg plot is transformed into something that looks like you might be able to grow something in it.

I don't think my Grade I listed hedges will ever be low-maintenance; but all the best things take care and love and attention to keep them at their best. And besides, I like to garden my hedges. The nice thing is that now I can garden in between them, too.

Hedging my bets #1

I am feeling the heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders.

You see, I have a proper hedgerow to look after. Actually, that's about the understatement of the year: I have about half a mile of hedgerow, as it forms the entire border of my very long and very thin garden.

Hedgerow is a proper recognised wildlife habitat: it's a priority habitat, in fact, protected under the Biodiversity Action Plan which describes them as 'particularly important for biodiversity conservation'. About 130 vulnerable species (so rabbits don't count) depend on them for their survival, including moths, birds, lichens and fungi.

Around here, there are miles and miles and miles of hedgerows. They are a wonderful, atmospheric feature of the landscape, turning lanes into green tunnels and patchworking the fields. They are, let's remember, essentially man-made: the farmers around here have formed them over centuries, with traditional management techniques which are still, essentially, unchanged (although these days they use tractors and flails, not billhooks). If farmers didn't manage hedgerows, they would disappear.

The OPAL project (it stands for Open Air Laboratories) is currently running a biodiversity survey which uses hedges to measure health of your local ecosystem. So I thought I'd put my own hedge to the test: you take a three-metre stretch of hedge and analyse the state of the hedge, its plant species, evidence of mammals living there, and any other creatures you find (mostly invertebrates like woodlice and snails).

I must admit mine was quite a cursory inspection: you're supposed to do these things in groups, and record it on a proper form, which I'd forgotten to print out. But in my randomly-chosen three-metre stretch here's what I found:


Plantlife:
Hart's-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium)
Herb robert (Geranium robertianum)
Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota)
Brambles (Rubus fruticosus)


Ivy (Hedera helix)
Creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens)
Nettles (Urtica dioica)

and I also happen to know (because they're now starting to come up) there are also;
Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis)
Cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum)

Other things:
Lichens, most of which I can't identify
Mosses, ditto
Little yellow fungi, ditto
Bracket fungi on the rotten bits

Woody plants:
Elder (of which the above is the oldest example I've yet found in the hedge)(Sambucus nigra)
Hazel (lots) (Corylus avellana)
Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa)
Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)
Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

It's also a sign of the health of my hedgerows that there is a good mix of dead wood and live: the live provides the fruits, berries etc while the dead wood is colonised by tunnelling insects and the like.

However the hazel is undeniably taking over: there is less blackthorn than I would like (though my poor prickled fingers don't agree) and I could do with some more elder too.

Creatures:
I didn't find much to look at since it was winter and very cold when I looked at my hedgerow, and most sensible things were tucked up warm and weren't remotely interested in being surveyed.

However I did find this rather fine evidence of rabbits (as if I needed any proof: they scatter to right and left as you walk down the garden here). I have also, since I've been here, seen voles, mice, fox footprints and hundreds and hundreds of birds: wrens, sparrows, bluetits, wagtails, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, and that's not counting the ones I couldn't identify. And buzzards, and crows, and seagulls. though I don't think they rely too heavily on the hedgerows for day-to-day sustenance.

You see? What a responsibility. But though I like wildlife as much as the next person, and have a sense of tradition and history, and a great love of the countryside: I must also garden. And my hedges are undeniably taking over my garden, to the point where there is little garden left. They are 8ft wide in places, for goodness' sake.

My next step? What would you do?

School lessons

I mentioned some time ago that I'd taken over the school garden.

Well, in the way of these things, shortly after I took it on, they started building work which meant not only was everything on hold for more than a year, but also we lost half the garden before we'd even started.

You take these things on the chin, though, and in fact it's all worked out OK in the end since now the work has finished, I know where we are and we can go forward. I got all inspired by the Dorset Cereals Edible Playground garden that won Hampton Court this year, and between me and various teachers and parents who should really know better, we've come up with a big and rather exciting scheme for developing a new space for the kids to grow lots of food in.

So before we started I thought I'd record what state it's in at the moment - neglected in places, presentable-ish in others, but in need of a lot of work, hopefully from people large and small.

This is the wildlife pond - weedy, unkempt, and recently much larger. The bit on the other side of the picket fence is tarmac now, but it used to be garden. Never mind: there are plenty of bits left to have fun with, including a raised bed, a soon-to-be herb bed and a bog garden, as well as sundry weed-infested borders which once cleared will be open to inspiration.

This is the (somewhat neglected and overgrown) Millennium Garden - can you see why?

And these are the raised beds along the front of the school itself. Currently planted with a hotch-potch of different plants, and not in too bad a state, but one talented mum has now come up with a design involving box balls, a lot of alliums, some Geranium 'Rozeanne' and a few prostrate rosemaries, which will hopefully pull this lot together and make it look pretty good for most of the year. This is our first project - I'm going shopping next week if the PSA give me the green light.

Finally - the bit everyone's getting excited about. All the kids in the school, from 4-year-olds in reception to the big girls and boys in Year 6, are being given a design project in which they're going to be asked to come up with loads of imaginative designs, from which we'll select as much inspiration as we can cram in without making it too overcrowded. From this we'll create our Kitchen Garden. The hedge behind it (a mixed wildlife hedge around the pond) is coming down by about half, which is a huge job for November, but I'm trying not to think about that too much: instead looking forward to lots of colourful drawings and some seriously good ideas!

Outside again at last!

Well after what seems like weeks and weeks of non-stop rain, I'm gardening again!

The water table is still high, but the rain has subsided to a light drizzle and the floods have abated enough to allow me to get a fork into the ground without turning it to mud. I'm back to a full slate of gardens and muddy knees.

This week I was tackling an out-of-control mixed hedge, containing hazel, conifers (not sure exactly what - it's not a strong point of mine, but I think it's some sort of cypress), and various assorted self-seeded things like ash saplings.

I'm all for mixed, aka wildlife hedges - I've got one at the end of my garden which is part adapted from what was already there and part encouraged by transplanting, say, a hawthorn sapling that self-seeded itself where it wasn't wanted. But you do have to keep on top of them or, like most native species, they go mad.

Hazel in particular heads for the sky very quickly indeed. I've got one in my hedge which I keep under very strict control - any stems going in the wrong direction are snipped out right away. I let it grow well above the line of the hedge (I think it makes the hedge more interesting to have plants of different heights from time to time) but I do take out a few of the thickest and tallest branches each year. You can, of course, just shear over the top with hedge-clippers, which is a brutal sort of way of doing it but very effective in keeping it in bounds.

This one in my client's garden, though, was about 50ft high, so that was rather out of the question. In the way that hazels do, it had multi-stemmed and several of the trunks were leaning quite heavily into the main garden. Well - I did the best I could, and pruned back the worst of it into the hedge line again. But in this case, as it's quite a high hedge, I've advised the client to get a tree man in (gardeners aren't qualified, insured, or brave enough, to tackle full-grown trees - it's much better to get a proper arborist in). Hopefully s/he will curb the general skywards tendency and cut it back to just below the top line of the hedge - then it doesn't matter if it sends up some thinner shoots, as I can keep them in a kind of pollard and make them behave themselves.

Sometimes situations just don't comply with the textbooks, and you have to find your own way around.