Life behind barbs

In the hazy heat of high summer, John Lewis-Stempel stops to contemplate the lives and loves, deaths and hates of his 600-year-old Great Green Wall

- Philip Bannister

THE biography of a hedge begins with its birth and whether this is dewy new or cobbled together. The first sort is the planted arboreal line; the other, a shrubby, scrubby barrier fashioned from pre-existing woodland. The hedge down the track to the house is the former—its hawthorns and blackthorns are as regular as teeth on a comb, evidence of a farmer planting by script.

According to biologist Dr Max Hooper’s famous formula, the age of a hedge = number of woody species in a 30-yard stretch x 110 + 30. Thus, the long and winding trackside hedge is about 600 years old, its staple of prickly trees intended to keep Tudor livestock in their place. Behind barbs, as it were. Time has augmented the hedge with dogwood, hazel, oak and field maple.

I suppose, for most of its life, the hedge was trimmed annually,so you could pop over it out hunting. Then, about 30 years ago, a 100-yard section was left to go absolutely wild, but with good reason. The hay barn opposite (a Brutalist grey, girder and sheet-metal affair) was, in some unfathomable exigency, constructed with its entrance to the west. Yes, the west, which brings the rains of all the known world. Eventually, to keep the wet off the hay, the facing hedge was allowed to grow up. And up.