Hope for the Lappinch

Our hedge on the left, our neighbour’s on the right. Ours shaggy, straggly and increasingly overgrown; our neighbour’s thick and beautifully trimmed into a traditional “A” shape. Which is best?

We deliberately left our almost 3 miles of hedges untrimmed over this first winter on the farm, partly due to other priorities but, more practically, because doing so should help wildlife by creating more berries and fruit as a food source over the lean winter months, and by providing valuable year-round habitat for all manner of pollinators, mammals and nesting birds.

However, while this may work in the short term, left to their own devices, hedges will naturally revert to their natural state of trees over time, becoming tall, gappy and less effective at their core function of retaining livestock.

Careful and well-timed trimming, and at certain stages even full blown coppicing or laying, are therefore critical to maintaining the long term value of hedges, both for wildlife as a habitat and food source, and for the farmer as an effective boundary.

In this context our neighbour’s neatly trimmed hedge is in many ways also a success, being thick, healthy and providing an almost impenetrable thorny barrier, not only for livestock, but also for marauding predators seeking out the eggs and young of hedge nesting birds. I can’t also help but think it looks rather lovely too.

As so often with life and nature, the key is probably balance, and that is our plan on the farm. Starting next winter, we will commence a 3-5 year cycle of hedgerow management, working progressively around the farm to trim back a few sections each year, while also gapping up holes with new whips and, if necessary, selective coppicing. Hopefully this should strike the right balance and maintain the healthy, vibrant hedges that are such a feature of the Cheshire landscape.