Red Rag to a Bull by Jamie Blackett

Author:Jamie Blackett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846892936
Publisher: Quiller

All across the county, the farming neighbours are hedge-cutting. This makes me cross, as we are barely out of September and the fruit that is so vital for the birds to survive winter has not had a chance to ripen, let alone be eaten, and will now go to waste. They do this every year as a routine post-harvest job, so that there is seldom any fruit anyhow as most hedgerow species flower, and therefore fruit, on the old wood.

I think they are eccentric, as to me the delight in owning hedges is in the spring thorn blossoms, the blowsy summer roses, and the autumn larders heavy with hips and haws and old man’s beard. And the reward is in the diversity of hedgerow birds that mostly nest in the bottom three metres and need good thick cover. They also need the blossom to attract insects on which to feed their young.

To me their behaviour is irrational, like having a garden where you prune all the shrubs, so that they never flower. On the other hand, they think I am eccentric for cutting the hedges every other year at most, and only in February when all the fruit has been eaten, because to them a hedge is a wild thing to be tamed, it needs keeping in check lest it encroach on any productive land or scratch their precious cars.

Its aestheticism comes from its form and its symmetry and its uniformity. Like cleaning your car on a Saturday morning, or mowing the lawn, it is something that has to be done to avoid letting the neighbourhood down. This attitude finds its expression in the ‘lollipop hedges’ that march across the fields, bare wooden trunks with carefully manicured bushy tops, like rows of bonsai trees. These are neither stock-proof nor helpful to wildlife, and will eventually die if not radically restructured, yet the idea of coppicing them and allowing them to bush up naturally from the bottom would be anathema to them.

The white settlers complain about the hedges if we do not cut them and then complain that they get punctures when we do. When we have coppiced hedges or cut and laid them, it has sometimes provoked a stream of invective about me ‘ripping hedges out’. They would like to see the hedges tamed, too, but they still seem to come and pick all our sloes and blackberries every back end without any sense of irony. There will not be any meeting of minds on the subject anytime soon.

The humble hedge is what defines the British lowland landscape. We take it for granted and yet when we contemplate the view almost anywhere else in the world, except Ireland, it might be beautiful, but in a few moments we realise that something is missing, some ingredient that transforms our enjoyment of it from satisfaction to delight. Only in these damp islands do we exploit the conditions that allow our native trees and shrubs to be stuck in the ground and grow to form a stock-proof barrier that will last forever, if given a little attention from time to time.

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