Wealden Times | WT262 | March 2024 | Kitchen & Bathroom Supplement inside

Hedge
Issues
Sue Whigham takes a meander along
nature’s verdant and vital corridors
istockphoto.com/ Ann Talbot
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
have announced that England’s
hedgerows would stretch ‘almost ten
times around the Earth’ if lined up
end-to-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.
England’s hedgerows
would stretch ‘almost
ten times around the
Earth’ if lined up
end to end
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
miles of hedgerows a year by 2037 and
an increase to 45,000 miles a year by
2050. Let’s hope that this plan remains
in place regardless of who is in power.
And to quote Rob Walton, “Hedgerows
are manmade green veins that wildlife
have adapted to and are dependent on.”
The BBC then diverted me to
Lionel Kelleway’s lively interview for
the Living World programme of a few
years ago when he walked and talked
with a hedgerow ecologist farming 80
acres in Devon, north of Dartmouth,
with its high rain count and acidic soil
and where hedges grow in profusion
and have done for centuries, many
appearing on ancient maps. Some
West Country hedgerows are even
believed to be 4,000 years old.
Rob Walton has 18 fields on his farm
and they are all surrounded by hedges,
some of which are 10-15 metres wide.
He was full of knowledge, facts and
advice about how to maintain them
to keep them at their best. He put
paid to the old Max Hooper rule
of dating a hedge by the number
of species there are in a 30 metre
length. The old rule of thumb was to
multiply the number by 100 and that
gave you the age of the hedge. Mr
Walton has been planting hedges
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