the field hedge

I went for my six-weekly haircut this morning in my hairdresser's new salon.  It was her first week of trading, and she looked exhausted after all the panic of getting the building fitted out, but triumphant.  It looked smart.  She asked if it was too girly, before declaring that it was impossible to be too girly, and actually with the butterflies pattern extending from the wallpaper to the hair dryers it was pretty girly, but in a stylish way.  She'd gone for purple rather than pink as her corporate colour, which toned it down a bit.  I took her a jar of honey by way of a salon warming present.  She gave me a leaflet for beauty treatments as I left, with a discount voucher, but I had to warn her that I wasn't very good at beauty.

Then it was back to the hedge along the meadow.  We can't have touched that hedge for at least two years, and it was a case of not a trim but of lopping off eight foot branches.  My conclusion, after living with a mixed native field hedge for twenty years, is that dogwood and gardens do not mix.  It suckers madly, it seeds itself, and where the branches touch the ground they layer themselves.  Dogwood does not want to be a hedge, it has ambitions to become a thicket, while field maple wants to become a full sized tree.  The idea of a mixed hedge is delightful, and the yellow autumn leaves of field maple are very pretty, but from a practical gardening point of view I suspect that plain hawthorn would be better.  Or maybe with some hazel for the catkins, which provide such good forage for the bees on mild winter days.  Hazel is not so invasive as dogwood nor so huge as field maple.

I took out quite a lot of the overhanging high branches with the long handled loppers, but it could do with a session with the electric pole saw, to take the tops out of some of the field maples before they really do turn into full sized trees.  Not that they don't make very attractive trees, but I don't want that much shade, and I do want the hedge to remain thick at the bottom, so that at least in summer it will screen us from the lettuce field.  At this time of the year it is entirely see-through.

In theory it is supposed to contain some hedgerow trees.  Planting them was a condition of the grant that our contractor somehow managed to obtain on our behalf.  There must have been more public money sloshing around the rural economy in the early 1990s.  The contractor duly included some oaks, swaddled in tree tubes, and while we did not harm them, we did not favour them more than the rest of the hedge.  Soon after the hedge was planted we had two brutally dry summers in a row, at a time when we were still on a private water supply and watering several hundred feet of hedging a long distance from the house was impossible.  Some of the trees survived, and some seem to have disappeared.  There is one chestnut that's looking particularly tree like, but I think that had better be managed as a pollard.  Pollarding is a traditional treatment for trees, although chestnut was usually coppiced, and we don't want a full sized chestnut tree looming over the meadow. Chestnuts grow huge.  If all the contractor's grant stipulated trees had survived and grown to maturity we wouldn't have a meadow any more, we'd have a shady edge of woodland path.

On the other side of the meadow the brambles are running riot along the edge of the wood.  I feel as though I'm working against the clock now, only another two or three weeks to do all the cutting back and bramble extracting I can, before the birds start nesting in earnest and it's game over until the autumn.