Thomas Pemberton
Why these old boundaries still matter
Walk almost any country lane in Britain and you are walking beside history. Our hedgerows run to roughly half a million kilometres, and many of them are far older than the fields they divide. Some follow boundaries recorded in medieval charters, some were planted in bursts of enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a few are the last visible traces of woodland that was cleared thousands of years ago. Since the 1940s we have lost something like half of them to grubbing out, neglect and over-tidy management.
For wildlife, a good hedgerow is not a fence. It is a larder, a nursery, a motorway and a fortress all at once. It offers nectar and berries, shelter from wind and rain, nesting sites safe from ground predators, and a connected route along which small creatures can move between woods, ponds and rough corners without braving open ground. Where hedgerows join up — with a ditch here, a scrubby margin there, a standard oak every fifty metres — they become something far greater than the sum of their parts.
What makes a hedge good for wildlife
Not all hedgerows are equal, and once you start looking, the difference is obvious. A wildlife-rich hedge is thick and layered. It has a tussocky base of grasses and cow parsley, a dense middle where birds can nest out of reach, a canopy that fruits heavily, and often a ditch or grassy verge alongside it. A hedge barely a metre wide and flail-cut to the same height every year has none of that depth, and its residents are correspondingly few.
Species variety matters enormously, because different shrubs feed different creatures at different times:
- Hawthorn — the backbone of most British hedges; May blossom for insects, autumn haws for thrushes and winter finches.
- Blackthorn — earliest blossom for early bees, sloes for birds, and the sole food plant of brown hairstreak caterpillars.
- Hazel and field maple — nuts and winged seeds, plus cover for dormice.
- Dog rose, honeysuckle and bramble — scrambling climbers that plug gaps and offer hips, nectar and nesting cover.
- Ivy — a late-autumn lifeline, flowering into November and fruiting in late winter when almost nothing else does.
Who lives in the hedge
Spend a quiet half-hour beside a mature hedgerow in May and the list writes itself. Whitethroats and blackcaps sing from the topmost twigs, dunnocks and wrens work the shadowy base, and a yellowhammer may still deliver its familiar refrain from a standard tree. In winter the same hedge holds redwings and fieldfares stripping the last haws, while a bullfinch quietly dismantles buds. Barn owls quarter the rough grass margin beside it at dusk.
Below the birds, the hedge is working harder still. Moth caterpillars and sawfly larvae feed on the leaves and in turn feed the nestlings — a single brood of blue tits can account for thousands of caterpillars. Bumblebees nest in the tussocky base, hedgehogs and harvest mice shelter in the litter beneath, and pipistrelle bats commute along the hedge line as though following a lit path.
Reading a hedge: a nature journal approach
The best way to understand hedgerows is to adopt one. Choose a stretch of about ten metres — long enough to be varied, short enough to know intimately — and visit it at least once a month. Treat it as a fixed transect and record the same things each time:
- Structure: height, width at the base, whether it is gappy or solid, and whether it has been laid, flailed or left to grow.
- Species: identify the woody shrubs by bud, leaf or bark. Count them. As a rough and much-debated rule, the number of woody species suggests the hedge's age in centuries.
- Phenology: note the date of first blossom, first leaf, first ripe berry. Over years, these notes become genuinely useful records of how seasons are shifting.
- Wildlife: birds seen or heard, insects on flowers, mammal runs and droppings, nibbled hazelnuts or sloe stones.
- Weather and light: a short line at the top of each entry, so you can compare like with like.
Sketch the outline of the hedge rather than trying to draw every leaf. A simple cross-section showing base, canopy and ditch tells you more about its value to wildlife than a detailed twig ever will.
A year of notes in one hedge
In January and February, blackthorn flowers on bare wood and winter thrushes strip the berries. March brings bursting buds and the first chiffchaff. By May the hedge is loud with song and busy with caterpillars. July and August offer fledglings and the froth of hedge parsley, knapweed and hogweed along the margin. September and October turn it red and black with hips, haws and sloes as warblers slip away south. And in November and December, ivy takes over — a small, unglamorous plant quietly feeding the last bees and the first redwings of winter.
Small things you can do
Protection is part of the picture: important hedgerows in England and Wales have legal protection, so always check before cutting, removing or significantly altering one. Beyond that, the practical steps are modest and well within reach.
- Leave a rough grass margin beside hedges rather than cutting to the base. It costs a little land and returns a great deal of life.
- Cut in late winter, not in the nesting season, and never every year if you can help it — berries and nesting cover need time to build.
- Restore rather than replace. An ancient hedge with its bank, ditch and buried seed bank cannot be recreated by planting a new one.
- Join a local hedge-laying or conservation group and learn the craft; a properly laid hedge thickens from the base and lasts decades.
- In your own garden, plant native hedging — hawthorn, hazel, holly, blackthorn — instead of putting up a fence, and leave the ivy alone.
Keep your journal going alongside. The more closely you watch one hedge, the more you will notice how much of Britain's wildlife depends on these ordinary, overlooked lines in the landscape — and how much a little care can bring back.
