Developing a hedge philosophy

In his book, Down to Earth, Monty Don writes, “The best thing you can do to encourage wildlife into your garden is to stop gardening…If it looks like an abandoned railway siding, then the job is well done.”

All hedge. No railway.

To be fair, he goes on to talk about compromise – making a garden that you find aesthetically pleasing, that is also welcoming to nature.

The ‘abandoned railway siding’ quote has come to mind often as we’ve been pondering the hedges around the garden and how much we should chop them or leave them be.

There’s quite a lot of hedge and, to be honest, we don’t really know what we’re doing with it. It’s made up of lots of different plants and some are reasonably easy to identify, even in the midst of winter – there’s holly, laurel and ivy – and some we’re hoping to identify once the leaves are back.

If you read around looking after hedges, you’ll find a lot of advice. Some of it is specific to the type of hedge you’re growing and how old it is. It depends also on whether you’re going for a ‘formal’ or ‘informal’ hedge. We’re going with one key piece of advice right now – trim your hedges outside of nesting season.

We’re trimming the hedges to neaten them up and to encourage them to be dense. In some places, keeping them lower will let more light into the garden. In other places, letting the hedges grow a little higher will give us more privacy. Some of the hedges border public roads, so we need to keep them fairly tidy.

We’re keen to keep the little birds happy, so time is running out (in the UK, nesting season is considered to run March to August). My other half has been up and down ladders, lopping and chopping, every spare moment lately. The last couple of weekends, accompanied by sunshine and birds singing, it has been quite a pleasure. It’s also creating a load more future kindling.

Over time (over years), I hope we’ll learn more about what works and what’s good for the various plants that make up the hedges. For now, I think it’s almost time to hand the hedges over to the birds and watch the abandoned railway siding look develop.

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