For my business partner Richard Gould and I, our autumn and winter is spent largely buried deep within a hedge — laying and coppicing, staking and binding. The summer months, meanwhile, involve us creating hedgerow management plans for farmers and landowners. Our plans detail the condition and health of the hedges, and we make lists of future management prescriptions and interventions that we may need to make in rotation over the next 10 years.
We jot all of our findings down on paper then laboriously put these details onto a spreadsheet. On nearly every hedge noted down in every row that we fill in, the letters ‘DD’ are entered. This stands for ‘deer damage’. The height of browse lines along hedges indicate which species are the chief culprits, as regrowth on laid hedges is laid to
