To lay or to flail? It’s no contest
ITF Trustee, Stephen Barber, joins a traditional hedge-laying group.
Take a walk through the English countryside. Did you ever stop to wonder how some of the old hedges acquired their fantastic shapes — thick, tangled horizontal boughs with vertical trunks, perhaps now fully grown trees?
It’s because they were once maintained as a cut-and-laid hedge, in the days before hedges (marking historic field boundaries) were savagely cut by mechanical flailer, as they are today. A traditional hedge would be laid every 10-15 years, in such a way as to be stock-proof without the need for additional fencing or electric wire.
To find out how it’s done, I joined the hedge-laying group of the Wychwood Forest Trust in West Oxfordshire. My first discovery is that it requires arduous physical exertion. Second, it’s an exacting process. Third, there are various different styles, of which West Midlands is just one.
Hedge layers are very proud of their tools, of which the most important are the billhook and the axe. It seems that each region of England had its own billhook design, from the favoured double-edged Yorkshire style to the prized, thick-nosed Pontypool type. A billhook is used to clean branches and, crucially, to pleach the stems of the hedge.
Pleaching means making an angled cut close to the base of the stem, creating a narrow hinge, allowing the sapling to be bent to an angle of 45 degrees (See the image below). As you work your way along the hedge, vertical hazel stakes are knocked in, which serve to keep the bent saplings in line and will be used to support binders at the final stage.
In between there’s a lot of cleaning up at the base of the hedge saplings, untangling the upper branches, and tidying up the hedge after pleaching. In the West Midlands style, the front side of the hedge is trimmed back, while the back is left uncut, to prevent livestock from browsing new growth.
The final stage is to bind in hazel whips in double pairs, twisting each pair separately and then together —strong wrists needed —weaving in front and behind the hazel stakes, meanwhile adjusting the pleached saplings to ensure the most even line.
The final result is very pleasing, and will last for the next 10 to 15 years. Fresh growth will appear not only from the laid stems but also from the base of the sapling. A pleached hedge serves as an excellent refuge and corridor for wildlife such as birds, mammals and insects —far more effective than a modern flailed hedge, which soon becomes thin and exposed in its lower parts.
All over the country there are amateur hedge-laying competitions, in which a skilled practitioner, alone, can perhaps lay as much as 10 metres in half a day.
As followers of the International Tree Foundation know, apart from our work in East Africa, we also plant trees and hedges in the UK, including Oxfordshire, thanks to our generous donors.
Let’s hope that some enterprising volunteers will come by and lay those same hedges in the future, for the sake of our countryside and its precious wildlife.
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