The Walls of England
Hedges for Farm and Garden. By J. L. Beddall. (Faber. 255.) OUR present generation is the very last to give so proud a title to the hedgerow, be it of stone or bush or tree or turf ; its farming community, especially in the eastern counties, is occupied as hard as it can go in eliminating hedges as impediments to the free manipulation of machines, in conditioning the land, that is to say, to the machine. Yet "the walls of England" is a definition that will bear investigation. Hedges not only form an embossed pattern that we recognise (now that the broad-leaved trees are going) as the most distinctively English thing about the English countryside— a pattern preceding the enclosures, since it is a mistake to suppose that there were no hedges to the open-field system—but they are walls within the proper signification of the term. There is no better way of keeping in the livestock and fostering those hedge-side medicinal weeds that cattle seek in compensation either for poor pasture or over-simplified ley mixtures ; and hedges, too, keep in the insectivorous birds that are part of the balanced economy of Nature. They keep the skilled hedger in the country who, if he loses his job like so many other skilled craftsmen, drifts to the
. towns and so helps to turn our man-Made economy into an inverted pyramid. Still more effectively, hedges keep out the winds from arable land, and the fenland farmer must have appreciated the force of this consideration when he saw them stealing his exhausted silt- land and running off with it to the next parish and beyond.
For these reasons and others, it has become important for us to have a really authoritative statement about hedges, and here, in Mr. Beddall's book, we possess it. It is impossible to conceive a more exhaustive book ; I quartered his ground to try and find something he had left out, and a miserable catch it was. The author does not mention the balsam poplar hedge for sheltering the Herefordshire hop-yards nor the wichert hedge of Buckinghamshire, nor in his elaborate instructions for planting hedges and keeping them in good heart does he lay due stress upon the value of compost. This poor bag is a measure of the encyclopaedic nature of the book ; but the tale is not at all told in the wearisome manner of that category, but with ardour and in good plain English.
Mr. Beddall is equally at home with the garden as with the farm hedge and the unparalleled variety of hedge types and techniques according to the regional and geological differences in soil for the latter that we in England enjoy (but no longer value as we once did) above all other countries. When we think of a garden hedge, for instance, we confine ourselves almost automatically to yew, box, thorn, laurel, beech, holly, privet, lonicera and perhaps, if we are gardeners ourselves, to a very few other experiments we have made. Mr. Beddall actually lists with annotations to them no fewer than 383 different species, sub-species and varieties of garden-hedge that lie open to us. He thinks of everything that could possibly do with hedges—the shapes of old hedge-bills, the right kind of hedge to avoid dazzle from cars in suburbs and town-parks, seaside hedges,. hedges for knot-gardens, shade-gardens, rock-gardens, kitchen gardens, terraced gardens, formal and informal gardens, gardens wet or dry, hedges so planned as to obviate the fatal frost-pocket for the orchard, fruit-bearing hedges, the correct craftsmanship for building dry-wall hedges, not only in the Cotswolds, but those which climb the mountains of North Wales and top or face the turf-walls of Cornwall, the niceties of hedge-pleaching, the local idioms not only for hedges, but for gates and stiles, even of how (and this goes sorely against his grain) to grub up hedges.
As a book of reference this work, as I have said, is nonpareil ; every aspect of the theme is covered=utilitarian, historic, technical, horticultural, agricultural, ecological, ornamental, aesthetic. It is a wisdom in the author that he makes much of the last, and it has become a rare one in books of information. But Mr. Beddall sees the hedge not only as a scholar in hedge-learning, but as a lover who estimates at its true value one of the most precious of our heirlooms from the land-culture of the past. Hence there is a whole- ness in his book which is the quintessence of its achievement, particularly so in days when disintegration is all the fashion.
H. I. MASSINGHAM.
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