Gardening
Deciduous hedges Denis Wood
For anyone with perception and a little patience, living hedges make the finest fences. They are varied, always interesting to look at and, if properly cated for, much longer lasting than fences made of wood, iron, wire and now, lamentably, plastic.
The early winter is the best time in which to put in deciduous plants for hedges. Transpiration will have practically stopped when the leaves turn colour or drop off, while the soil temperature is still high enough for the roots to make organic contact with the soil and begin to grow. Before beginning to plant a hedge, it is Well to recognise that the plants in it will be living in unnatural conditions — much closer together than they would be in nature and, therefore, competing vigorously with each other for water and nutrients. It is important then to give the plants as good a start as possible by digging a generous trench, breaking up the bottom to assist drainage, spreading a layer of animal manure or garden compost, covering this again with soil before putting in the plants and refilling the trench with good top soil. In subsequent years watering and mulching will make a great difference to the speed of development and ultimate success of the hedge.
Almost any shrub or small tree can be planted in a line to make what I would call a fancy hedge, exotics such as forsythia, berberis, cotoneaster, even lilacs and, too often, malapert hybrid polyantha roses — and abroad in warm climates, hibiscus and oleanders. There is a legitimate and acceptable case for making hedges of fuchsia and escalionia in maritime districts, but for practical purposes, there is a hard core of three to make what I would call warrantable firm deciduous hedges, beech, hornbeam and hawthorn.
Beech and hornbeam have the advantage that they retain their russet leaves during the winter and provide a solid visual barrier for practically the whole year. They are planted eighteen inches apart in a double row alternated ('staggered'). They have not the toughness of hawthorn for a boundary but make attractive interior hedges to form partitions inside a garden, and, can be clipped as tightly and geometrically as a yew (which, with holly, being evergreen is outside our purview today). Hawthorns or quicks as they are known, when used for hedging are planted one foot apart in a single row. When first. planted the apprentice hedge will look thin and spindly as if it would never come to anything but, after two years, the making of a first-class boundary hedge will be evident, to outsiders daunting with thorns, twiggy, closely inter-textured, a home for the nests of singing birds, and attractive at all times — even under close clipping a hawthorn hedge usually manages to produce a few May blossoms at its sides.
In his very interesting book, Fieldwork in Local History (Faber), W. G. Hoskins gives a list of forty-nine trees and shrubs that may be found in English hedges and lanes, many of which have existed there for centuries. Hoskins cites some of the work of Dr Max Hooper of the Nature Conservancy which suggests that the age of a hedge can be approximately calculated by counting the number of species in a sample 50-100 yard length, on a basis of one species for each 100 years, thus a hedge with four species could be 400 years old and one with ten species may go back to pre-Conquest times. To return to Hoskins's forty-nine, our beech, hornbeam and hawthorn are, of course, included in this list from which we could also take two of the wild roses, R. arvensis and R canina to mix in with hawthorn hedges, and others also, to use for an outlying loose screen — such good native plants as the field maple, spindle, blackthorn, honeysuckle and that spendid and beautiful yeoman, the wayfaring tree.
Previous page
