You can date a hedge by counting its bushes
In the 1970s an ecologist called Max Hooper compared hundreds of English hedges against the documents that recorded when they were planted, and found a rough but startling relationship. Walk thirty yards of hedge, count the different kinds of woody plant in it, and multiply by a hundred. That is roughly its age in years.
A newly planted hedge is usually one species — HAWTHORN, most often, being thorny, fast and willing to knit together when laid. Everything else has to arrive on its own, carried in by BIRD droppings or wind, and that takes time. A stretch holding hawthorn, HOLLY, BRAMBLE, hazel, elder and blackthorn has been there a very long while. It is a rough guide rather than a law — hedges planted as a mixture break it — but on a walk it is a good party trick.
Britain removed about half of them
After the Second World War the country wanted more food from less labour, and grants were available for ripping hedges out to make fields big enough for a modern tractor. Between the 1940s and the 1990s something close to half of Britain's hedgerows went, tens of thousands of miles of them.
The mood has reversed. The Hedgerows Regulations of 1997 made removing most countryside hedges without permission an offence, and three-hundred-year-old hedges now get protection once reserved for buildings. Many are being replanted — though one put in this year will take until the twenty-fourth century to resemble what was grubbed out.
A gap of a few metres is a wall
A hedge is not just a place to live, it is a road. A hazel dormouse spends almost its whole life off the ground and is famously unwilling to cross open grass, where an owl can see it. So a hedge linking two woods is a route a dormouse can actually use, and a ten-metre gap where a gateway was widened is, to that animal, a dead end.
The same applies at different scales to a HEDGEHOG working its way along the bottom, a VOLE or MOUSE under the TANGLE of TWIGS, and a FOX using the LANE at dusk. Conservation work on hedges is often less about planting new ones than about closing the gaps in the ones already there.
Do not pick blackberries after the end of September
The old advice is that the devil spits on the BLACKBERRY at Michaelmas, the twenty-ninth of September, and after that they are his. In some tellings he was thrown out of heaven, landed in a BRAMBLE and has borne a grudge ever since.
The folklore is doing a real job. Autumn damp brings moulds onto the fruit and late berries ferment on the BUSH, so October ones really are likelier to taste sour and upset a stomach. A saint's day was an easy date to remember in a country where most people could not read a calendar — which is how a lot of practical advice got stored.
A year in the hedge
Spring brings BUDS and blossom, and a SPARROW, WREN or ROBIN building a NEST deep in the thorns where almost nothing can reach it. Summer is leaves and insects. Autumn is the payoff: BERRIES everywhere, hawthorn and blackberry and IVY flowering absurdly late to feed whatever is still flying.
Then winter, when the hedge stops being a larder and becomes SHELTER — the one strip of cover in a bare field, and the whole reason so much lives there. Even the NETTLE at the foot earns its place, feeding caterpillars. Everything in this grid is packed into a band of scrub two metres wide along the edge of somewhere else.