Life on the hedge
Hedgerows are the bias-binding, the strong, frilled and embellished seams holding our quintessential patchwork quilt together.
These intense, linear distillations of woodland edge have become vital connectors in an often hostile, difficult or exposed environment for wildlife – as well as travelators into our historical and cultural landscape. A hedgerow might be a 1,000-year-old remnant boundary, or a 200-year-old hawthorn hedge, parcelling up common land and prompting a rural ancestor to up sticks to the town. It could also be a new conservation hedge; a simulacrum of what has been lost, and a hopeful re-creation for the future.
