Another First-time for Green Gym

By ‘C’:

“Having waited so long, I hope we enjoy it!” 

Many a Green-Gymmer may have been wondering that as we assembled on a morning gently refrigerated by airflow from Arctic winter.  (Wind: NNE 8 knots.  Temp: around freezing.)  The task which was new to us: hedge-laying. 

Yes, in all the years we have been planting hedges, weeding and watering hedges, or clearing up after other people who had been working on hedges, we had never ourselves undertaken the ancient art of hedge-laying.  We had always been told we would – at some point in the future – be inducted into its mysteries.  (“To make you feel much better than you could know”?)  Today that future arrived.

First, a bit of a walk, before gathering in the work area, all expectant – though most volunteers did not express this quite as exuberantly as Ruby the dog, who was having a wonderful time in the great outdoors:

It was easy to see where the previous work party had left off:

So, traditional hedge-management, lesson in.  Regional style: Midlands, which is good for areas of mixed arable and livestock.  The original reason for doing this: stock-proofing the fields.  The purpose behind doing this now: to create wildlife-friendly habitats.

How to do it?  We began by learning some of the terminology.  The basic bending-over of a tree makes for a ‘pleacher’, complete with ‘tongue’ and ‘heel’:

Most of the re-growth will come from there.  It is, however, a matter of observation that when there are hedge-laying competitions, and judges return a year on to bestow prizes for the sections showing the best re-growth, those awards are generally won by novices.  Because novices typically make small nicks with their billhooks, which stimulate growth in other places.  So where hedge-laying is done outside of competitions, it is known for site managers to walk along the line deliberately making small notches, to stimulate vigorous re-growth.  (There is such a thing as ‘beautifully imperfect’.)

The first step is to prepare the line of trees by ‘siding’ (cutting away unwanted growth).  That job is done when someone can walk through the hedge-line.  Then address your first target.  Make a cut two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the trunk, at about ankle height …

exchange pruning-saw for axe or billhook, remove glove from hand holding your chosen swinging tool, and shape the tongue …

finally – and gently – bend the tree over:

Repeat along the line.

Next stage: staking.  Uprights need to be set vertical, about a cubit apart, and giving as much support as possible to the pleacher.  They are bashed in with what we would call a ‘bodger’ and here seemed to be a ‘bosher’.  (Both words pronounced with a short ‘o’.)

To finish off: binding.  Stakes and binders are, of course, fashioned from some of the side-growth removed earlier.  Every pleacher has to be ‘captured’, so as not to be blowing in the wind.

All this was far too complicated and technical for me.  Being huffle-brained (as they say in Wisconsin) – as well as homely as a hedge fence (as they also say in Wisconsin) – I personally had been fairly sure from the outset that I would discover I was no good at all at conjuring hedge into hedge-fence.  I was right.  I am not going to posing for winner’s photographs at any hedge-laying competition any time soon, like not in my lifetime!

Thankfully, everyone else seemed to get the knack pretty quickly:

There was also plenty enough for me to do, dragging away brash to burn-site.  And it was a very pleasant spot of the countryside to be working in, with views across a field of winter beans, towards Wittenham Clumps:

If you look closely, you can see on the horizon, to the left, the spot where we might have been working for this session.  Those dots on the skyline are not, as some people speculated, livestock. 

“No those are not cows.  Those are trees!”

The scrub only appears from a distance to be all lined up in a row.  Clearing it was what might have been scheduled for today, but the site manager decided instead to treat us with something new and more exciting.

By session end, some actual tree-laying had been successfully accomplished.  (Well done!)  The temperature had risen to 4 Celsius.  And a long section of hedge-line had been made ready for laying:

The general verdict on the morning: “That was good fun!”  Volunteers had probably not got quite as excited as Ruby, who seemed to have worked off enough energy to warm the Earth Trust offices for a week; or as demonstrative as a dedicated football fan, whose team is achieving a notable first.  Nevertheless, Green-Gymmers on a cold day were warmly appreciative of the new task: “Mental work too – you had to think about what you were doing.”