COUNTRY • LIFE
Peter Quince It has been a wonderful autumn: on that everyone is agreed. Whatever the winter holds in store for us in the way of meteorological travail, we shall long remember the procession of golden days which preceded it. Even my ancient neighbour Mr P. informs me that he has never known its equal, and since his memory reaches back for more than eighty years I find his testimony impressive, especially as he is not in the habit of giving the present the benefit of the doubt when making comparisons with the past. Like other old country people, he seems to keep a sort of mental card-index of what the weather was like in previous years. If we get a severe winter he is infallibly able to judge it against exact recollections of even worse hard spells in 1927, or 1933, or some other distant time; and in any fine summer he is ready with details of even better seasons long ago, when rivers dried up and the sun grilled the countryside for months on end. This autumn has set him searching his memory in vain.
I took advantage of the warm, sunlit
afternoons to investigate some of the very old hedgerows which still stand at the extremities of this parish. These have always been rather neglected among the pleasures of the autumn landscape, until recently at any rate. Everyone looks for the rioting colours of the trees and woods, but the hedges scarcely attract their due share of admiration. It may be that, as people become more aware of the speed at which they are being torn up by efficiencyconscious farmers, the value of their contribution to the scene will be more generally realised. They have been providing a superlative display in recent weeks. I was walking beside one rambling, overgrown hedgerow the other day, admiring the dense mosaic of leaves of an infinite variety of tints, when I remembered visiting the garden of a rich friend and being invited to admire the 'tapestry hedge' which he was having constructed. By dint of complicated planting arrangements and carefully-planned juxtapositions, he was creating a most pleasing effect of contrasting foliage. But the truth was that the effect was nowhere near so pleasing as that produced by this one wild Dank of shrubs and small trees.
It contained, I noted, an unusually large number of species, which is usually a sound indication that there has been a hedge on the same site for a great many years. Professor W. G. Hoskins, in the course of his investigations of English local history, evolved the theory that for every hundred years of its life in an unmanaged condition a hedge-bank will have added one more species of shrub to its flora. This may seem a a surprisingly slow rate of addition: but it has to be remembered that a great many hedges in our landscape have served as boundaries for a thousand years or more. Where a hedge-bank forms a boundary of a parish, or of a farmstead which is recorded in the Domesday Book, it quite possibly dates from Saxon times.
The hedge I was examining contained, at a casual count, some ten different species, many of them now heavily festooned with that whiskery creeper called Old Man's Beard. It was also exceptionally thick, and as far as I could judge it really consisted of two hedges which had once been separated by a narrow track, but which had been allowed to grow together, with the public right-of-way being shifted at some stage to the edge of one of the adjacent fields. Later, the Ordnance Survey map confirmed my suspicion that it was not merely a field boundary but that it also • marked the boundary of the parish. In all probability, therefore, it has had an uninterrupted life of not less than five or six hundred years, in some form, and quite probably a great deal longer than that. The old track which followed the course of the hedge for some reason failed to grow into a more important lane and then, in due course, into a metalled road, as other tracks have done; instead it dwindled to a seldom-used field path. But the hedge is still there, marking the perimeter of the parish, and also, happily, still lighting LIP the autumn fields with a display of brilliant foliage which modern gardeners spend much time and effort in attempting to imitate.
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