This blog was written by Lilli, residential volunteer at RSPB West Sedgemoor, Greylake, and Swell Wood
Compared to Germany, the first difference I noticed in the landscape has been the massive number of hedges. They are literally everywhere. We do have hedges back home as well but not to that extent and especially not in every field. You find most hedges in gardens to create a visual cover and border to the next garden. There are some on big fields but mostly at the edges.
When I now think of England one of the first things that come to my mind are hedges. They play an essential part when it comes to creating habitat, a source of food for animals and natural barriers for livestock. I was lucky to get involved in hedge laying, so I not only learned how to create a new thicker hedge I also learned all the benefits and importance of a healthy hedge. In the following I will describe how we did lay our hedges (and different styles.)
A healthy hedge is thick and compact, has a variety of plants in it like blackthorn and hawthorn and a bunch of wildlife is living in it. What you sometimes see is a yearly flailed, gappy, thin hedge or an overgrown hedge full of brambles.
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The hedge in the background is a good example of how a hedge should not look like: gappy and trimmed every year. This does not provide a good habitat for mice, birds and insects.
Both happens if you do not maintain hedges correctly either through over-maintenance and hard straight cutting or neglect. Hedges serve as a natural barrier for livestock and prevents them from escaping or falling in a ditch. Furthermore, it creates habitat for butterflies, dragonflies, and birds. Brown Hairstreak Butterflies lay their eggs on young blackthorn stems and hazel dormice like the sheltered environment.
When we started laying our first hedge in December 2022, we found out that it hasn’t been laid for the past 18 years. What we saw was a stretch of blackthorn and ash fully covered in brambles. Before we could start laying, we had to spend a few days clearing and removing adverse vegetation. That was quite a lot of work since brambles are not the most pleasant plants to work with as well as spiky blackthorn. Eventually we could start laying smaller trees and blackthorn.
The first step to lay a tree is sawing a horizontal cut about halfway through the stem, 20cm above the ground. Then we used a billhook to remove wood above the cut getting thinner towards the sawn section. Creating a triangle shaped form (as seen on the photos) allowed the tree to be laid down slowly on to the ground but still being alive and connected to its roots (that’s now called a “pleacher” which is basically a cut and laid stem).
The final step is to saw the lower stem with a straight line pointing down to the ground to prevent water sitting in the stem causing rotting wood. Ideally you want all trees facing in the same direction and bending and weaving them over each other. When they start growing and develop new shoots, they are nice and close to each other. We had to work with what we had and that required a bit of variation and pragmatic thinking. Having had not enough material to lay in every section we created our own “pragmatic style” to prevent later gaps. Maybe that was not the technique you would learn in a book but adapting and adjusting methods to the given circumstances is crucial in or daily work.
Once we laid all layable trees, we chain-sawed the bigger ones out but kept some dead trees which are great habitat for bugs and insects. If there would have been a huge gap due to missing material, we would plant additional young plants. That’s how this hedge was created where there was nothing but grass before.
(A first proper sign of spring is that you can see the blackthorn to be in bloom.)
There was a need for a fence around the new planted hedge because deer enjoy eating the buds which stops young trees from growing.
As I already mentioned we did a pragmatic version of the so called “Devon Style” which is mostly found on top of a river or ditch banks. There is an other style called the “Derbyshire” that uses vertical stakes along the hedge on which the laid trees are weaved around. Or the Midland style which is mostly used by farmers because that hedge is really stable and keeps the cows in their field.
We must stop laying hedges at the end of March because of nesting birds so that’s it for this season. Overall, we finished three hedges since December and hopefully we can see the results in a few years.
West Sedgemoor Residential Volunteering team