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What the world can learn from Britain’s humble hedge
- seltzered_ 5y agoTo frame this in a different way, how would woodland areas (or what the article is calling hedgerows) work before the Enclosure Movement? Would there have been more diversity? A different approach to agriculture? I find this article a bit odd in it's approach (although supportive of more hedgerow area) and in inquiry of where the concept of hedgerows came from.
- t0mas88 5y agoI don't think hedges are really woodland areas? It's only a small line of hedge for many acres of corn or grass or something.
- masklinn 5y agoThey’re not, though in the extremely deforested british isles they might be accounted for to run up the numbers.
- lbriner 5y agoIn many areas, the hedges are also connected to smaller "copses" or woods since there are plenty of places where the land wouldn't practically support planting crops. In other more wild places, the hedges are much more hap-hazard and are part of the overall wooded area with a mixture of trees, shrubs and grasses. Some areas though, where farming conditions are pefect, look much more like the USA Mid-west where all you can see are large areas of crops and border hedges. Either way, they can still provide valuable protection, nesting and food for insects, birds and small animals.
- multjoy 5y agoHedgerows pre-date the enclosure act by centuries, land has always been demarcated. The enclosure act relates to the takeover of common land.
- seltzered_ 5y agoThanks for clarifying, didn't know that.
- iam-TJ 5y agoHedgerows were, and are, natural living fencing. For farmers with livestock 'hedge-laying' is something that needs doing every 50 years or so (if well maintained) to ensure the lower sections are animal proof. Take a look at the British National HedgeLaying Society (NHLS) which holds national championships. Our local farming shows often hold competitions too (a neat way to get some of our hedges done for free!): https://www.hedgelaying.org.uk/pg/info/styles.aspx https://www.hedgelaying.org.uk/pg/info/styles.aspx
- c54 5y agoMy brain is apparently poisoned, I thought for sure this was about financial hedging, or maybe brexit as a hedge against the rest of Europe, or some other political-economy hot-take garbage. Anyways, glad it's about plants. Happy Thanksgiving, all!
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>Anyways, glad it's about plants. confused me, what with there being nothing about foreign agents being used to manipulate the media, but then I realized it was about vegetative matter. :)
- tomxor 5y ago> then I realized it was about vegetative matter Manipulating vegetative matter into homogeneous shapes. Not entirely dissimilar then? On topic... While we still have a lot, we have also lost a lot of our hedgerows to commercial farming practices. So Britain aren't exactly great examples either. These are supposedly insect habitats - insects which have all but vanished in recent years which will no doubt have a large ecological impact.
- blocked_again 5y agoYeah. I thought Britian bought a lot of BTC to hedge against inflation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TickCount 5y agoI thought at first this was about hedge in the linguistic sense (which is closest in meaning to "humble" of all the senses of that word)
- rmbyrro 5y agoYou're not alone in this twisted mind universe
- sirdavidof 5y agoHow unique is this to Britain? Do other countries have similar hedge density?
- masklinn 5y agoIn many places they were torn down following mechanization as they’re inconvenient when tractoring about. I know that some places are starting to incentivise planting them again, because bare fields let wind race and as soon as it rains a bit hard half the field ends on the road blocking it.
- lbriner 5y agoHow many is "many"? In almost all farms, there are hedges and they simply have gates or gaps in them to move between fields so they shouldn't be so inconvenient that the entire hedge needs to be removed. I was reading that the UK might only have 30 harvests left before the soil is completely depeleted due to intensive farming and the necessity of fertilisers to try and compensate. If there was better education for farmers, for example access to free consulation, good use of additional flora and correct crop-rotation can increase yields significantly. If someone is cutting down a hedge, it probably proves that they should be first on the list!
- masklinn 5y ago> How many is "many"? Most or all of continental western europe. AFAIK hedges used to be pretty common all over agricultural regions (e.g. belgium, beauce, bresse, bavaria, …), they largely got torn down after WW2, except for north-western france, and a few areas which retained them for historical or cultural reasons (e.g. Monschau). > In almost all farms, there are hedges and they simply have gates or gaps in them to move between fields so they shouldn't be so inconvenient that the entire hedge needs to be removed. That requires going to the gate in order to get in and out the field, as well as limit your ability to farm to the edge of the field, and it limits the size of the agricultural equipment you can use short of rebuilding the hedge any time it gets too big. And the logic was likely that if you’re bringing heavy equipment to open larger gates in your hedge, and removing part of the hedges because land is being consolidated, you might as well remove all of it right now than have to do so every 10 years.
- FundementalBrit 5y agoI knew a lot of farmers who managed to get rid of problem hedges during the height of the pandemic because local planning didn't respond within 42days when we had the first major lockdown.
- zeristor 5y agoInteresting, any links to cite?
- FundementalBrit 5y agoNope just speaking to farmers at shoots over the last month. Not something you'd openly speak to journalists about, god forbid the RSPB gets involved which are at this point a countryside mafia.
- garrtt 5y agoHedging (1942) https://youtu.be/WoprVhpOKIk https://youtu.be/WoprVhpOKIk
- musicale 5y agoPopup #1: Support Science Journalism! (who wouldn't want to, right?) Popup #2: Stay In The Know! (well I certainly do, right?) Popup #3: Explore More (wait, what was I doing here again?) <closes tab>
- tomgp 5y agoWorth watching the short video embedded in the article to get an idea of what these hegerows look like in practice. The illustration makes them look like standard manicured garden hedges rather than the reality of impenetrable intertwined masses of different species. [edited to fix a typo]
- Brakenshire 5y agoThere’s also a concept of dating the age of hedgerow by the diversity and randomness of plant species.
- robotmay 5y agoThis’ll likely make me sound like a lunatic, but when I go abroad from the UK, hedgerows are one of the top 3 things I miss (the other two being beer and tea). They’re just so ubiquitous when travelling here, and they make the world feel a bit smaller. As a wildlife photographer I probably take 75% of my photos of birds in hedges. I don’t have to camp out for hours - I just walk along the hedgerows aimlessly. Also, if other countries don’t have hedges, what happens to the grotty pornography magazines that dwell natively in the hedgerows? Are they in some sort of meta-state of quasi-existence? A theoretical hedgerow porn mag?
- mherdeg 5y agoIn the US they are mailed to members of Congress.
- RotaryTelephone 5y agoWow that went off on a tangent
- willyt 5y agoIt’s a thing. For some reason, country folk like to stash thier porn mags in hedges.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alaxsxaq 5y agoProbably a reference only the British would get. Look up 'hedge porn'.
- cameronh90 5y agoOne of my earliest memories was on a road trip to the Devon with my parents. The family got out of the car and went up to a hedge to try and pet a cow, and there were porno magazines propped up along the hedge as far as the eye could see.
- gerdesj 5y agoDifferent regions of Britain have different styles of hedging and walling. For example "Devonshiring" is quite a distinctive mud bank with very dense hedging made up of a huge number of species. There will be a narrow or very narrow road running with hedges either side at around six to 12 foot high. My uncle's farm near Dartmouth (Devon!) is a good five miles through a lane that often brushes your wing mirrors on both sides simultaneously. Passing places are sporadic but usually less than 500 yards apart - often gate entrances. On moorland, dry stone walling is the usual delimiter, see Bodmin (Cornwall), Dartmoor Exmoor, and heading up north - The Peaks in Derbyshire(ish), the Yorkshire Moors, etc and most of Cumbria and Northumberland. One of the odd regions out is the New Forest (laid out about 1000 years back for King William I) This region famously isn't enclosed and is also mostly no longer forest too. I've only covered England but Wales, Scotland and Ireland have their own varieties of land demarcation, mostly involving hedges of some sort unless moorland in which case stone is generally indicated in exposed areas but all are largely familiar to each other. The article goes on about maintenance. Farmers fit a a device called a flail to the back of their tractors and trim the hedgerows after birds have fledged. They trundle along at around a slow walking pace. It can get a bit dicey driving in a lane in mid to late spring time because the overgrown hedges block your oncoming view.
- gshubert17 5y agoI grew up on a farm in east central Illinois in the 1950s and '60s and remember the hedgerows along the township gravel roads which were on a grid a mile on a side. There were pheasants and quail and I don't remember how many other species of birds; no doubt less than the hedges in Britain, but still considerable. I don't recall when the hedges were removed but I think in that area they were gone by the 1970s. What a loss! And only in one lifetime.
- new_guy 5y agoWhen the British colonised India they had an 1,100 mile long hedge to stop salt 'smugglers' (who were really just Indians trying to do their thing while being oppressed) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Hedge-India-Quest-Wonders/dp/1841194670 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Hedge-India-Quest-Wonders/dp/... https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/colonial-india-british-hedge-salt-tax https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/colonial-india-british...
- User23 5y agoOne interesting thing is that traditionally English hedges were not trimmed, but woven. It was significantly more labor intensive, but resulted in a much stronger barrier.
- jhoechtl 5y agoI think even more correctly it would be (hedge) laying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoprVhpOKIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoprVhpOKIk (1942)
- rp1 5y agoThe video did not do a good job convincing me that hedges promote biodiversity. I’ve seen more than a badger, rabbit, fox, and mouse on the streets of Berlin in a single night.
- FredPret 5y agoMaybe they go to Berlin for the nightlife
- twic 5y agoYeah, there are a lot of underground hedge clubs that rp1 is obviously not cool enough to know about.
- BucketsMcG 5y agoBerlin's a weird city, to be fair. It has vast amounts of green space (like, right in the middle of the city is a disused airfield bigger than Monaco), and practically every street is tree-lined. It's about the only city on earth with urban goshawks, wild boars roam the suburbs (and steal naked sunbathers' laptops), and now the raccoons are moving in...
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- ryantgtg 5y agoAs a kid I lived in a small neighborhood in the small town of Montecito (adjacent to Santa Barbara) called The Hedgerow District. Some truly magnificent, towering hedges there. Roughly here https://goo.gl/maps/ckkBszjTHqkqL25Z8 https://goo.gl/maps/ckkBszjTHqkqL25Z8
- zeristor 5y agoJust found this by Oliver Rackham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Rackham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Rackham “Social Forestry Network” Hedges and Hedgerows Trees in Britain: A Thousand Years of Agroforestry https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/950.pdf https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/950.pdf
- zeristor 5y agoTwo chapters from his book the History of the Countryside.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- reillyse 5y agowhat seems to be missed here maybe for some vague ideas of it being less "natural" is that every hedgerow that I've ever seen that is being used as a livestock barrier has a hefty dose of barbed wire preventing the livestock from going through. You can nail barbed wire right into trees and bushes and attach electric fences with screw on attachments right into trees. Works great. Still has all the benefits for nature but is much more practical from a farmer point of view.
- flurdy 5y agoI hate hedges. Selfishly. It is great for animals and birds, probably good for farmers, but suck for people. I live in South England, in Hampshire, in the South Downs, which is full of undulated countryside full of fields with hedges. It is pretty. But also I never see any of it as the massive overgrown hedges blocks all views. And make it unnecessarily dark. I might as well live in a city or suburbia. Apart from in the winters when the leaves are gone it is bearable. I have lived in other countries with none to minor fences by paths and roads. And I have also lived further north in England, in the Peak District, which use more stone/rock walls which are not that high. A drive or even better a bike ride is then wonderful. And not dangerous as you can can see when a car comes the other way round a sharp corner.