Surrey Homes | SH110 | March 2024 | Kitchen & Bathroom Supplement inside

Hedge
Issues
Sue Whigham takes a meander along
nature’s verdant and vital corridors
Recently the BBC’s Today
programme carried a feature
about England’s hedgerows
which created a lot of interest among
listeners. On the strength of that,
Martha Kearney interviewed one of
them, Emma Bridgewater, the pottery
business founder, and someone who
likes to get ‘close and personal’ with
the hedgerows in her North Norfolk
garden. I very much liked the sound
of her creation of a place not only to
sit and have a cup of tea or a drink but
one where she can actually get inside
her hedge – accessing it through (or
over!) an old garden shed. I can just
imagine it, although I’ll confess I’m
finding it rather tricky to describe.
A project led by Dr. Richard
Broughton of the UK Centre for
Ecology and Hydrology based in
Lancaster has spent the last five years
mapping the hedgerows of England
using advanced laser scanning. They
England’s hedgerows
would stretch ‘almost
ten times around the
Earth’ if lined up
end to end
have announced that England’s
hedgerows would stretch ‘almost ten
times around the Earth’ if lined up endto-end,
which is a reassuring statistic,
bearing in mind that hedges are so often
being grubbed up or left unmanaged
(which does them no good at all). The
technology is fascinating, recording
as it does the state of our existing
hedgerows, measuring their height and
condition and being able to work out
how much carbon can be removed
from the atmosphere and stored in
the structure of these hedgerows.
It’s hoped that this advanced
mapping will guide both planning
and restoration of our exceedingly
vulnerable wildlife corridors. Under
its Environmental Improvement Plan,
the current Government has pledged
to support farmers and landowners in
the restoration or creation of 30,000
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