I’m still revelling in the sun and dry, so my walks have become happy, smiley affairs once more; it’s also perfect weather and the best time of year to enjoy our farm’s hedgerows. Among the just turning leaves you can find nests, berries and fruits of all sorts. The blackberries, unfortunately, have all but gone, moulded away in the wet, and those silly, greedy squirrels have gnawed and spat out every last one of our hazel nuts long, long before they were ripe; but there are still plenty left – crab apple, bullace, wild pear, and all those aforementioned bryony ropes, guelder-rose bracts, sloes, hips, haws and the shouting pink-orange of spindleberry – creating intensely vivid splashes of colour. Hopefully these will help feed flocks of redwings and fieldfares that pass through the farm on the way from cold northern climes to their southerly winter quarters. You could also find dormouse nests, if you’re lucky, and the remains of this year’s birds nests – blackbird, song thrush, chaffinch, wren – the list is endless.
Did you know there’s a rule of thumb that says that every woody plant in a 30 metre stretch of a hedgerow adds a century to its life? By that reckoning, some of our hedgerows are a staggering 1200 years old. This may well be true, since the great Devon historian Professor W G Hoskins estimated that a quarter of our hedgerows are over 800 years old. That’s older than many of our parish churches! And some hedges running off Dartmoor, a continuation of the old Bronze Age reeve system, must be around an extraordinary 4000 years old. Others will be original remnants of the wildwood that clothed the landscape before man carved out his fields.
Devon really is the place of hedgerows in a nation renowned across the world for them. We’ve got more than any other county, and not only are a great many of them ancient but most, like those of our farm, support a remarkable variety of different trees, shrubs and, of course, abundant wildlife. Each part of the county has its own distinctive hedgerows, ranging from the ancient lines of ash and maple enclosing sunken lanes in the Blackdowns to the tall beech hedges of Exmoor. But it is perhaps the banks upon which the woody plants grow that show the most variety. In our area around Hatherleigh these are turf-faced, low key affairs in comparison with the granite boulders, often huge, than underlie Dartmoor’s hedges or the beautiful herring bones patterns of Morte Point on the north coast.
Here are just a few photos to show you the richness of our Locks Park hedges. If you’re interested to find out more follow this link to Devon Hedges where you will find information on the Devon Hedge Group which celebrates this heritage by organising Devon Hedge Week. This year the week runs between 25 October and 2 November, and its theme is the diversity of hedgerows.
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September 25, 2008 at 7:14 am
Lindsay
Will follow the link regarding the hedges. The field behind our house has amazing hedges – so I will now go and count the woody varieties and see what I can find.
September 25, 2008 at 9:42 am
paula
Good counting – and get back with what you’ve found. I’d be interested
September 25, 2008 at 5:01 pm
elizabethm
YOur photos are stunning again. We are planting quite a lot of mixed native hedging when it arrives barerooted this autumn. We also have some existing ones but the variety in yours is just amazing.
For some reason this year we don’t have any sloes, or damsons and the plum crop is non existent too.
September 26, 2008 at 3:11 am
heidi
The spindle berries are amazing! Are they truly that hot pink color?
Amazing pics…
Do you harvest any of the hedge bounty?
My buddy Amy makes elderberry mead from our local wild berries…mmmyum!
September 26, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Catherine Sherman
What gorgeous photographs. I almost feel that I’m walking along, enjoying the beautiful hedges and scenery along with you. Your photos and commentary (and comments on my blog), make me look at my own landscape with more appreciative eyes, too. I wonder how many of the plants and fruits are the similar but with different names? We have hedge rows, nothing like yours. They’re probably 150 years old at the most and consist mostly of osage orange trees that were plant to mark farm fields. Other shrubs like dogwood have grown among them. These trees have very hard orangish wood that’s very hard to cut (also called ironwood) and large green fruits called hedge apples that kids like to throw in the streets. I think I’ll try to photograph some.
September 28, 2008 at 8:57 am
paula
The sun – actually and the dark sky in the sloe one – should take the credit! But thank you – love appreciation elizabeth…
Our hedges are one of the reason they should be falling over to give us the HLS agreement you hear me harp on about – they are, I’m told, exceptional even for around hear.
We’ve poor fruits this year too, and patchy -though the photos give the impression of bounty.
September 28, 2008 at 9:05 am
paula
They are heidi – there’s something so un-English about them. I remember the first time I found them in a hedgerow and thought they must be an escaped garden shrub – but no they’re not.
Yes I do, I make jams and jellies from most of the berries and fruits – rowan, though I was a little disappointed in. If I could get the nuts I’d eat them…but those squirrels! I make elderflower champagne and elderberry wine too – if there are enough flowers and fruits, and various other hedgerow wines in a good year. But I haven’t tried mead – sounds good…
September 28, 2008 at 9:11 am
paula
That’s a wonderful compliment Cathy.
Yes I wonder too. I think perhaps they share the same genus but are different varieties. I didn’t know you had hedges in your state. Do they enclose huge tracks of land or do you have anything resembling our ‘patchwork’ field system?
Look forward to you post on them.
September 30, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Don’t Fence Me In! « Catherine Sherman
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