The following conversation starts at timestamp [1:38] in the podcast.
Now in this section you're going to hear me going Hedgelaying in Shadoxhurst. I know, that does sound like it's the kind of thing that Rambling Syd Rumpo might have sung about.
[sound clip of Rambling Syd Rumpo singing]
Many thanks to Kenneth Williams there. But hedgelaying’s not just an ancient dying art, it's an essential skill that is actually being revitalised as farmers and landowners across the country come to realise the enormous benefits of a well-laid hedge, as opposed to one that's been indiscriminately cut back to the same height year after year by machine. A properly laid hedge is not just a boundary marker of sticks. It's a windbreak, it's stock proof, and it's haven to myriad species of animals and birds and insects, especially predatory insects that are brilliant at gobbling up aphids and flies that would otherwise potentially blight nearby crops. Well, in the last week of February, I went along to Moat Farm near Shadoxhurst for a Healthy Hedgerows workshop, along with twenty or so others from their local farming cluster group to find out more from Megan Gimber from the People's Trust for Endangered Species.
Megan Gimber: Officially, I'm the Key Habitats Officer, but unofficially I'm the Hedgerow Geek and I think my unofficial title describes what I do much better than my official one.
Rob Smith: Well, Megan, it’s lovely to meet you, Hedgerow Geek! And we can see in the background that there's a bit of hedgelaying going on here. And what do you think when you see this kind of stuff actually going on?
Megan: Ohh, this is fantastic. So we're here at a farmer cluster group day today, which is basically where lots of farmers get together. Sometimes there's a speaker or a demonstration, but it's a wonderful place where we can all talk and discuss what's going on in farming. Now today we're focused on hedges and this is fantastic because it's a practical demonstration about what hedging and hedgelaying looks like; so how it might apply to other people's farms, how, you know, what it actually takes to lay a hedge and what we might expect from those laid hedges going forward.
Rob: OK, so why is a hedge an important thing? Why do they matter?
Megan: Ohh. Well, how long have you got?
Rob: If you keep it under the hour, that would be fine!
Megan: I could talk all day about why they’re important. To keep it simple, they're important to our farming, so they're important for the health and the welfare of our livestock in terms of shade, shelter, additional diverse browse for our livestock to eat. But when you broaden that out, they're also fantastic for pollinators, which we know we need for other aspects of farming. For pest control; all sorts of wonderful predators live in our in our hedges, things that eat insects, things that eat rodents, you know, all sorts of wonderful predators in our hedges. And then you can widen it out further still. We look at things like, you know, hedges will be storing and sequestering carbon. They're going to be protecting our soils. They're going to be helping floodwaters get into the soils rather than rushing off and taking our soil with it. So you know they've, they've got, the list goes on and on and on of things that hedges can do for us.
Rob: And so, in wildlife terms, they are probably the single most important habitat we have in the country?
Megan: Absolutely, yes - and you know our farmland, over seventy percent of the UK is farmed. So actually within that, within what we do on our farms, hedges I would say are the most important habitat. For the amount of land area they take up, which is not that much when you think about all of the wonderful things they do for wildlife and for us.
Rob: We have lost a colossal amount in the last forty years. So things have started changing in the last couple of years. We'll come on to that, but just give us an idea of how much hedgerow we've actually lost in the UK since the war.
Megan: You've made the classic mistake of thinking in the 1960s was forty years ago! I do the same with the 1980s. Yeah, it's a little bit longer ago than that. It was a little bit longer ago than that. So, we think we lost up to about half of our hedges post-war - so the sort of ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s – and this was this was intentional. We were we were given subsidies by the government to take them out as a period of intensification. We thought taking out our hedges would mean that we could grow more food. And I think it was quite, quite quick. It was back in the 1990s that it was said, “Actually, this is this is not the way to be doing it,” and started putting grants in to encourage farmers to put them back in again.
Rob: So what did that mean? I mean, because I know that in terms of bird life, you can see it kind of falls off a cliff from the 1970s. Do you attribute that to the hedgerow loss?
Megan: Partly, but that's not the whole story. And farming obviously has gone through some big changes since the war in terms of how we're farming, the rotations, we've got a lot more specialised. We've also been draining the land as a lot more as well. So hedges will be part of that story. But I'm certainly not going to stand here and say hedges are the only story behind species decline. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot more to it than that.
Rob: But they are a key element…?
Megan: A key element. And I tell you what, I'd rather look at it on the other side. They’re a key element of species recovery. So we know just how many species thrive in a hedgerow ecosystem. It's phenomenal.
Rob: Hit me with some numbers, then – if you've got a really good bit of hedge, what are you gonna find in it?
Megan: Well, one chap down in Devon, Robert Walton, who is an absolute hedgerow legend, looked at one of the hedgerows on his farm and he found - in a short stretch of hedge - he found 2070 different species. And this was on Dartmoor, which is not famous for being the most hospitable place. It's very wonderful and wild. But you know if a hedgerow on Dartmoor can have that many species living on and in it, then we can do that everywhere. It's – they are absolute ecosystem dynamite. They're wonderful, fantastic things.
Rob: Do you do you come to all of this from a kind of a wildlife background or from a farming background? What's the – have you got like a kind of a mainspring for why you are a hedge geek?
© Rory Harding
Megan: A little bit of both really. I come from Devon. So we’ve got the best hedges in the world down there and I will hear no other way about it, and I grew up on a farm. I'm not a farmer and my family aren't farmers but I grew up on and within farms in a small sort of village farming community. So I was born into this sort of countryside farming reality.
Rob: So I mean from that then I'm taking it that you can kind of have your cake and eat it, you can be a good farmer and have wildlife-rich hedging?
Megan: Ohh absolutely, absolutely. And I think more, more and more people are coming to the conclusion that's what we want, which is great. You know most of the country is farmland, so most of the conservation needs to be done by farmers on farmland, and hedges are a fantastic place to start.
Rob Graham: I’m just trimming the side growth. Then there's some old brambles here, so I'm just cutting the brambles off at ground level, but they will regrow.
Rob Smith: Rob Graham is a hedge layer and conservationist, and he gave a practical demonstration of his art.
Rob G: I grew up on a traditional mixed farm on the Kent-Sussex border, and I think it was just from an early age, having that freedom in the countryside, it just got into my blood that that's what I wanted to do, was to be working outdoors and working with nature.
Rob S: And which elements of it do, you particularly enjoy – is it the physical work or is it when you get to look at it afterwards and sit down and have a cup of tea?
Rob G: Probably, it's at the end of the day when you can actually see what you've done, like with the hedgelaying, because it is a very physical job and yeah, you do, you do sleep well of a night. But to actually finish the length and look back is so rewarding. And to top it all off, you can drive around the countryside for the next ten years and look at your handiwork.
Rob S: So we're looking at a bit of your handiwork here that you've put some hedging in and just talk me through what you've actually done. This is just a little short section. So obviously, if you've been working on this all day, you'd have done significantly more on it. But this little bit that you've done here in the last half hour, what have you actually done?
Rob G: Well, what we're doing is we're laying, this is traditional hedgelaying. So we're laying a hedge, the South of England style. So it's an overgrown hedge that’s very gappy in the bottom. So what we're trying to do is, is lay it so we cut two thirds of the way through the bottom or three quarters the way to create a hinge and the hedge runs up at thirty degrees. So we're trying to encourage new growth from the bottom. So it's giving an old hedge a new lease of life because hedgerow trees have a short lifespan today, maybe sixty to a hundred years. So if they're not coppiced, they just get top heavy and fall out and then they could die. So what we're doing is laying it over and then once we get it down to the thirty degrees we put stakes in every forty five centimetres or eighteen inches and a hazel binder through the top just to support it for the first three, yeah, three or four years, until you get the new growth comes up again and then then the hedge is supporting itself.
Rob S: You've got the hazel coming through it. And you’ve been laying- so this is blackthorn?
Rob G: Yeah. This is blackthorn we’re laying. So it's a scrubby margin to an old hedge. So what we're trying to do is recreate a hedgerow boundary by laying the blackthorn. So it's rejuvenating it. And everywhere we done a cut on the blackthorn to sort of cut on the pleats to lay it over and cut on the stems to get them all growing in the right direction is going to encourage new growth.
Rob S: Right. I mean it's just astonishing that it doesn't kill it. You look at it, the amount of wood that's chopped off at the base there – as you say it's like, you know, more than three quarters of the way through. It does look as if it shouldn't ever be able to come back from that. But it does.
Rob G: It defies logic because when you, you know, do coppicing or tree felling you cut equal amounts and the whole tree falls off. Hedgelaying, it defies gravity or logic because you’re cutting two thirds three quarters away through. But as long as you've got what they call the hinge, which leaves enough bark and the white wood called the cambian on the outside. The nutrients flow up the outside of the cambian and that will, you know, keep it alive – and it grows. It is staggering. I'm, I'm amazed at times.
Rob S: And what you've created here is a beautiful thing in its own right in terms of the way that it's all interweaved, kind of woven through, like a sort of basket effectively. But in six months’ time you you won't see any of that. It's growing back again.
Rob G: No, because it is a work of art and it’s like with hedgelaying you're like a builder cause you're building a hedge rather than sort of cutting and flopping. You're actually, you know, you are an artist. You're making something of nothing.
Rob S: And I’ll go back to what I was asking you before, is it the actual making of the hedgerows or is it the nature? Which is the bit that that lights you up the most?
© Mark Hamblin
Rob G: I think it's all of it because it's like, I do like nature and one thing I do like is all the birds. But a lot of times – I am an accidental bird watcher, so sometimes I'm working away, and a lot of times you're using hand tools and then you can hear like a little sort of goldcrest or, yeah, birds of prey. And even on a wet, damp day when you're really miserable, you just hear a little bird singing its heart out and it just raises your spirit. And I think it's a combination of both, yeah, nature and being outside, creating something that you can look back at.
Will: It's such an interesting art. It's something that I've seen on the telly many times and you hear people talking about it all the time…
Rob S: Will Samuelson is a local landowner.
Will: …but I've actually never been up close to it and I thought what a great opportunity to come and learn about hedgelaying.
Rob: So you've got a bit of hedge yourself haven't you?
Will: We have, we've got around about five kilometres of hedges we think.
Rob: Right OK, so that's - that's a significant amount - you can actually do something useful with that. Are you gonna change what you're doing with your hedges as a result of today?
Will: We – yes, and we've already started making changes – we're becoming very much more environmentally aware of our hedges and that the ecosystems that they offer to all the wildlife on the farm. So for the first time in about thirty five years, we haven't cut any of our internal hedges. We're going to let them grow up and then next year we will likely trim the tops and build a more of an A-frame structure and try and encourage growth at the bottom of the hedge.
Rob: And why are you doing that? Why is it an important change to make?
Will: I think all of us have noticed in the last ten years how the ecology of our farms has changed. We don't see the insects on our windshields like we used to. We're not seeing the birds that we used to, we're not seeing the – there's so much wildlife from rabbits to hedgehogs. And so something is changing and we need to adapt, otherwise we're going to lose our wonderful countryside, all the life in our wonderful countryside.
Rob: So it’s been a useful thing today?
Will: Absolutely brilliant, absolutely brilliant. All the events that I attend with the Cluster Group and Kent Wildlife are fabulous and there is so much to learn. And, you know, and we got a short time period to really make a difference.
Rob: The day was hosted by Jan Bax and her husband Mike who together own Moat Farm.
Jan: Well, we have a hundred acres of wildflower meadows, which we - twenty seven years ago -decided no more nitrogen, no more chemicals. And it was really Mike's vision of, he was worried that he was watching birds disappearing too fast in front of our very eyes, and he thought he wanted to do anything and everything we could to help them. So we've been creating our wildflower meadows, which are fantastic. Now I think the field I'm most excited about is where we had seven orchids, common spotted orchids. It's now completely covered, absolutely wonderful. And then we have our loveliest semi-natural ancient woodland. It's about a hundred and seventy five acres and we coppice that yearly. Probably coppice about one and a half to two acres each year and that wood is used to run four houses, heat four houses – so the main farmhouse and three other houses and a farm office and a workshop. And because of that we've upped our nightingale numbers because we have the wonderful regrowth for nightingales.
Rob: Is it a working farm? Do you keep sheep or…?
Jan: We have longhorn cattle, yes, longhorn cattle, which are our conservation grazers.
Rob: And then do you sell them for meat at some point or is it just purely managing the land for conservation?
Jan: So Kent Wildlife bought our lovely heifers who are doing the conservation grazing on the golf course area over near Sevenoaks, which they bought and they're turning back into conservation and wilding it. And the boys go for beef.
Rob: And how long have you been here?
Jan: Thirty seven years.
Rob: You getting the hang of it?
Jan: I think so. I don't know – when Mike said, “This is what I want to do,” I was a little bit frightened because I'm a farmer's daughter who'd been to agricultural college and quite liked the thought of lovely lush lays for sheep and cattle. But now I just absolutely love seeing these meadows full of bees and butterflies and crickets and grasshoppers and completely alive.
Rob: And what made you want to host this hedgelaying conversation today?
Jan: Ohh, well Mike's always been very involved with Kent Wildlife, and he had his chair – he was chairman for seven years and we're very involved with the Cluster group. And I know Ellen was keen that they did it and did it here and we of course loved the thought of doing it here. It's been fantastic having Megan doing an amazing talk. She just was amazing, wasn't she? Just real absolute passion and so lovely to have her on our farm talking through our hedges. And I was quite nervous about getting her out. I thought, “Gosh, she might say, ‘What have you done and Mike done to the hedges?’”. But it's been lovely that she's been very positive.
Rob: And that's the thing, isn't it? That, even though this is not necessarily the best time of year to see, you know, once we get into spring and everything is in leaf and there's blossom and there will be birds everywhere and that kind of thing. Even so, I can hear there's an awful lot of bird life around here. There's a lot of stuff going on, isn't there?
Jan: It's amazing, isn't it? I know. The time it really hit me was when Mike and I went out about three in the morning when the nightingales were here and we were listening to nightingales all over in the woods three in the morning. Absolutely heavenly. Pitch dark, but when the sun started rising or you know, light suddenly was coming into the wood, the birdsong was absolutely phenomenal. I just didn't realise how many birds we had.
Rob G: We untangle the stem that you're laying or the pleach you're laying and then you free up the bit you're going to lay and then down at the bottom of the pleach you're going to cut two thirds or three quarters of the way through.
Rob S: And this is the thing, isn't it? You know as we look at what Rob's doing with his hedge laying it, it's quite a brutal process. And when you first look at it, you think, “Oh my God, what have you done?”
Megan: I know, it can look quite harsh and some people look at this and think it's destructive. But I think once you understand what it's doing… what they're doing is taking a hedge that's got a limited lifespan and it's making it immortal because every time you lay it once every forty years, you give it another life cycle. So you're taking something that's, that might live sixty odd years and you're making it immortal. So I think this is a superpower.
Rob: Right OK! So I don't quite understand. So the original route, if you've got a hawthorn and you cut it off more or less at the base and lay it over…
Megan: So you get the regrowth at the base…
Rob: Then it will live indefinitely?
Megan: It’ll live another forty years and then someone will do it again and then it will live another forty years and someone will do it again and you'll have another forty years. Whereas if you didn't have that process, you wouldn't get that regrowth from the bottom that would enable it to do that.
Rob: So you never need to re-plant a hedge ever. You just need to manage it and it will last forever.
Megan: Ideally, it will last forever as long as you keep it on that rejuvenation cycle. Doesn't have to be laying, it could be coppicing and you could do it every thirty years if, you know, if you wanted to, but you need to make sure it spins through that rejuvenation. It's the only way they keep going in the long term.
Rob: And in terms of the, the wildlife side of it, what - you know, you mentioned over two thousand species. Presumably a lot of that will be sort of moths and insects and lichens all sorts of other things.
Megan: Loads of that’s insects, yeah. But we know how important insects are further up the food chain. I mean, once we lose our insects, we lose a lot of our birds as well and our mammals. So yeah, a lot of that's insects, but that will also be small mammals, hedgehogs, dormice – dormice love a good hedge, especially in this part of the world. And then you've got birds nesting in there. Then you've got all the things that come to a hedge for food. So you've got the things that physically live in there. Then you've got all the things that come to your hedge for food. So whether they're eating berries or leaves or maybe they're a barn owl that's hunting on the small mammals that live in your hedge. And then of course, you've got things that need the hedge to move along the countryside, so things that need it as a corridor.
Rob: So am I right from the talk you gave earlier on that the last two or three years we've seen more hedgerow planted than maybe the previous forty or fifty years put together?
Megan: Yeah, it's been phenomenal. So the government has given grants to put more hedging in and it's just been amazing, the recent uptick. The last couple of years in particular have been astounding for the amount of hedging going in and we're set to see that continue. So the government has—
Rob: Why is that happening?
Megan: Well we are down a lot of hedges. We had more than we do now. We've realised how valuable they can be to our farming, also to help reverse some of the species decline that we've seen. So there's now money to put some of those hedges back in and these can be -- we're in a wonderful situation. The government has committed to planting and restoring forty five thousand miles of hedging between now and 2050 which is huge. And we get to choose what they do. We get to choose which ones are there to protect the soil – and so, you know, might put them in different places – or which ones are there as wildlife corridors, which ones are there for wood fuel. Which ones are there on coppice rotation. So we get to design them, put them in to, to benefit us and our current farming needs.
Rob: Now, lots of people who are listening to this won't own a thousand acres of countryside. There's lots of people listening to this will just have a garden. Is there anything, is there such a thing as a pointlessly small hedge? You know, if you just plant a couple of bits in your back garden, will that help overall? Does it make a difference?
Megan: It will, of course it will. So with rural farmland hedges, we look at hedges, they have their value for food, for habitats, and for connectivity. Now if you've got them in your garden, even if you don't have connectivity, they can be food and habitat to wildlife. Now if all of us had wonderful wildlife gardens, then that would add that connectivity levels back in. So again, our gardens can act exactly like hedges act in farmland, but within our gardens and within our towns.
Rob: So we should plant a bit of blackthorn, we should…
Megan: Maybe not blackthorn! I don't wanna be responsible for blackthorn in gardens. No, maybe not blackthorn. Most of the other species you find in a countryside hedge will be absolutely fine in a garden. But personally, if you've got a small garden, I'd steer clear of blackthorn.
Rob: OK, why is that? Does it just go a bit rampant?
Megan: Blackthorn has a wonderful habit of suckering. So - it's - you plant it in one place and then it creeps out and you find suckers of it everywhere and it's got some pretty nasty thorns on it, which are wonderful to keep the cows in a field. But I wouldn't necessarily want a toddler running around the garden with the blackthorn!
Rob: Fair enough. That makes sense. OK, but so, other native planting in the garden is basically a good thing?
Megan: Absolutely. And you can be a bit creative in a garden as well. I've got a hedge in my allotment which I've made out of fruiting material as well. So you can put – I mean, I'm a greedy guts, I love to forage in a farm hedge but I also love a fruiting hedge in the garden. So I've got blackcurrants in mine as well. So things like that. Just, you know, as long as it can be laid, as long as it will work in a hedge and flower and fruit, you know, put it in. Preferably native species in gardens, but things that will flower, things that will fruit, things that will provide a nice nesting habitat as well.
Rob: Excellent. And I think you're right, I think you are a hedge geek!
Megan: I am. I am. There's no two ways about it. I'm not ashamed!
Rob: The fabulously enthusiastic Megan Gimber, Key Habitats Officer from the People's Trust for Endangered Species, AKA the Hedge Geek. She's brilliant. Do keep an ear out in a future episode for nightingales because the plan is to return to Moat Farm and visit some of Mike and Jan Bax's woodlands that provide perfect nesting habitat for one of our most iconic birds, which is of course sadly currently red listed, but with their help is making something of a comeback in their part of Kent. So that's something to look forward to!
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