Hedge and copse scheme, Cambridgeshire.
By my reckoning, this bare root planting season
the Habitat Aid hedge elves will have planted something over 130,000 plants around the country. There's some repairing of existing hedges but it's mostly new planting - woodland areas and new hedges, often on the sites of old grubbed out hedgerows. This makes me happy, particularly as they're all species native to Britain and plants grown from British stock by British growers. Great for the wildlife that depends on them, great for everybody. So long as they're looked after (!?) in a modest way we will have left our mark on the landscape for many years.
This season hasn't been without its troubles, however. Most folk use
bare root hedge plants; they're cheap, easy to handle, and have a good success rate. They're planted when dormant, in ground that's not frozen or waterlogged. Here are the two problems. First off, as the more observant of you might have noticed, some early blossom has already been out for a while and the first shimmers of green are apparent in the hedgerows. It looks more like mid-March than early February out there. This means that there's a huge rush on to get plants in the ground before they break dormancy, in which case they react badly to being transplanted. Alternatively, if like us you have suppliers who can chill their stock, you can hold spring back.
We've needed to do this for a number of sites which are underwater. In my book it's probably not terribly bright building a solar park on the Levels, in a site surrounded on all sides by rhynes (deep drainage ditches) and where the local botany consists exclusively of rushes and sedges. I'm surprised the arrays haven't started to sink. Anyway, the chances of planting that particular site before April are zero.
There's a pond in my hedge! Wiltshire.
Climate change is having an effect on how we're planting these hedges and what they'll look like. Sections of
Hawthorn and
Hazel will fail because they will rot in standing water. We'll replace them with
Willow and
Dogwood. The hedge will look much redder in the winter and spring. We are slightly moving old hedgelines in order to avoid really wet areas and tweaking mixes for some sites, particularly in the wetter west, to include more water tolerant species. The look of the countryside will change.
The methodology of planting will alter too. Specifiers - typically in our case ecologists and landscape architects - will have to be more flexible when it comes to planting times and species. A site can't be planted between November and end March if it's typically submerged for that period. More hedge mixes need to include wet loving plants; without them there can be some real disasters as "extreme" weather creates impossible conditions for some species.
