Hedge (botany)

“ There is not a single hedge anywhere—no harbour for such plants as have not the stubbornness to live on in spite of plough, and pick, and spade, and hoe. Flowers there are—for flowers are obstinate and persist in coming—grape hyacinths, star of Bethlehem, lungwort, scarlet anemones, tulips, blue-bottles, cornflowers, salvia, and so on—because they dive out of reach of the spade and share, or because they do not object to having their tubers cut up they—rather like it. ”

“ Bad times in farming have greatly helped the beauty of hedges. They are mostly overgrown, hung with masses of dog-rose, trailed over by clematis, grown up at bottom with flowers, ferns, and fox-gloves, festooned with belladonna, padded with bracken. The Surrey hedges are mostly on banks, a sign that the soil is light, and that a bank is needed because the hedge will not thicken into a barrier. ”

“ Our climate is dry, and most hedges do not thrive so well here as there; labor is high-priced, and the trimming is therefore likely to be neglected; our farms are so large that much fencing is required; timber and wire are cheaper than live hedges.
However, hedges are used with good effect about the home grounds. In order to secure a good ornamental hedge, it is necessary to have a thoroughly well-prepared deep soil, to set the plants close, and to shear them at least twice every year. For evergreen hedges the most serviceable plant in general is the arbor vitae. ”

“ The long grass flowing towards the hedge has reared in a wave against it. Along the hedge it is higher and greener, and rustles into the very bushes. There is a mark only now where the footpath was; it passed close to the hedge, but its place is traceable only as a groove in the sorrel and seed-tops. Though it has quite filled the path, the grass there cannot send its tops so high; it has left a winding crease. By the hedge here stands a moss-grown willow, and its slender branches extend over the sward. Beyond it is an oak, just apart from the bushes ”

“ There also grew the nightshade, with other solanaceous weeds, bearing little clusters of green and purple berries, wild oats, fox-tail grass, and nettles. The hedge gave them shelter, but no moisture, so that all these weeds and grasses had a somewhat forlorn and starved appearance, climbing up with long stringy stems among the powerful aloes. The hedge was also rich in animal life. There dwelt mice, cavies, and elusive little lizards; crickets sang all day long under it, while in every open space the green epeiras spread their geometric webs. ”

“ A character of the ordinary plants growing in the hedges is the tendency they often have to form very long, straggly stems, which are too fine and weak to support themselves, but which are quite strong enough to grow up through the hedge and bear leaves, as they are partly held up by the other vegetation. ”

“ Raspberry suckers shoot up in one part of the copse; the fruit is doubtless eaten by the birds. Troops of them come here, travelling along the great hedge by the wayside, and all seem to prefer the outside trees and bushes to the interior of the copse. This great hedge is as wide as a country double mound, though it has but one ditch; the thick hawthorn, blackthorn, elder, and bramble—the oaks, elms, ashes, and firs form, in fact, almost a cover of themselves. ”

“ CHAPTER XX HODGE'S FIELDS
The labourer working all the year round in the open air cannot but note to some degree those changes in tree and plant which coincide with the variations of his daily employment. Early in March, as he walks along the southern side of the hedge, where the dead oak leaves still cumber the trailing ivy, he can scarcely avoid seeing that pointed tongues of green are pushing up. Some have widened into black-spotted leaves; some are notched like the many-barbed bone harpoons of savage races. The hardy docks are showing, and the young nettles have risen up. ”

“ With its large needle-like spines, an inch to an inch and a half long, studding its broad fleshy leaves, and capable of inflicting a wound difficult to heal, and with smaller spines covering the flowers and the fruit, it is easy to see that to a barefooted and lightly clothed people such a hedge presented a very formidable, not to say impassable, barrier. ”

“ Most of the fields are square, or at all events right-angled, unlike the irregular outline and corners of fields in other counties. The number of meadows make it appear as if the land was chiefly grass, though there is really a fair proportion of arable. Over every green hedge there seems a grassy mead; in every hedge trees are numerous, and their thick June foliage, green too, gives a sense of green colour everywhere. But this is relieved with red—the soil is red, and where the plough has been the red furrows stand out so brightly as to seem lifted a little from the level. ”

“ Under their cover, well shaded and hidden, birds build, but not against or on the stems, though they will affix their nests to much less certain supports. With the grasses that overhung the edge, with the rushes in the ditch itself, and these great plants on the mound, the whole hedge was wrapped and thickened. ”

“ Slender grasses, branched round about with slenderer boughs, each tipped with pollen and rising in tiers cone-shaped—too delicate to grow tall—cluster at the base of the mound. They dare not grow tall or the wind would snap them. A great grass, stout and thick, rises three feet by the hedge, with a head another foot nearly, very green and strong and bold, lifting itself right up to you; you must say, 'What a fine grass!' Grasses whose awns succeed each other alternately ”

“ In the hedge itself a hedge-sparrow just once lets loose its frail dewy song, a nightingale utters one phrase of marvelling and is still. The musky wild roses star all the hedge and the scent begins to wander in the moist air with the scent of honeysuckle and of shadowy grasses. Under a now misted sky that makes the light seem to dwell no longer in it but in the grass, the flat, yellow field running to the little wood is a place impregnable and inaccessible. ”

“ In Southern gardens, Cypress made close, good garden hedges; and Cedar hedges fifty or sixty years old are seen. Lilac hedges were unsatisfactory, save in isolated cases, as the one at Indian Hill. The Japan Quinces, and other of the Japanese shrubs, were tried in hedges in the mid-century, with doubtful success as hedges, though they form lovely rows of flowering shrubs. Snowballs and Snowberries, Flowering Currant, Altheas, and Locust, all have been used for hedge-planting, so we certainly have tried faithfully enough to have hedges in America. ”

“ It is hardy and of rapid growth. Good plants are six dollars a hundred, and should be planted a foot apart. Catalogues say that if planted in rich soil one foot apart, a hedge five feet high can be grown in three seasons. Common Privet is more hardy than California Privet. Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora makes a beautiful low-growing hedge; good plants can be bought for six dollars a hundred. Berberis Thunbergii, or Barberry, makes a fine hedge, on account of its beautiful foliage and scarlet fruit. ”

“ The low, clipped hawthorn hedge shewed, on the other side, a green and winding lane, which divided the fertile meadows, some of which still swept in emerald luxuriance, while others were sweet with the newly-mown grass. ”

“ The Evergreens mostly prosper with any aspect. Among the best are the various Ivies and Cotoneasters and Crataegus pyracantha.
The trees and shrubs which may be used are numerous; but for dense hedges perhaps the most useful are Holly, White Thorn, Privet, Barberry, Laurel, Box and Yew. Where possible, the straight line of a long clipped hedge may be broken by groups of shrubs planted within, unless a formal garden effect be desired. It is well to distinguish between the use of shrubs or trees as bounding fences or screens and their use as beautiful individual plants ”

“ If we except the Privet, the examples of plants in our third group are quite unfit for hedge purposes, as they are entirely without offensive armature. Privet hedges are not unfrequent in gardens, where they are useful for boundaries, blinds, and to act as shelter, but as a farm hedge-plant it is quite useless. ”

“ Pruning is the most important matter in the whole business of hedging. A hedge set out ever so well, and composed of the best variety of plants, if left in the weeds, without proper care in trimming, will be nearly useless. A well-trimmed hedge around a fruit-orchard will keep out all fruit-thieves. The great difficulty is the unwillingness of cultivators to cut off, so short and so frequently, the fine growth. ”

“ Rushes have sprung up and mark the line of the ruts, and willow stoles, bramble bushes, and thorns growing at the side, make, as it were, a third hedge in the middle of the lane. The best path is by the wood itself, but even there occasional leaps are necessary over pools of dark water full of vegetation. ”

“ Something grows, to be sure, which we choose to call a hedge; but it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation that is accumulated into the English original, in which a botanist would find a thousand shrubs and gracious herbs that the hedge-maker never thought of planting there. Among them, growing wild, are many of the kindred blossoms of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers brought from England, for the sake of their simple beauty and home-like associations, and which we have ever since been cultivating in gardens. ”

“ On the other side of the hedge was an extensive field of sugar-cane, in all the rich luxuriance of a matured and abundant crop. An immense mass of foliage, of the liveliest green, thick and impenetrable in its growth, its tops waved gracefully in the wind with a rustling sound that was borne onward until it died away in the distance. On the opposite side, visible through the hedge, the field was skirted by a forest, which, ascending a slope behind it, and becoming thinner as it ascended, left only a few trees scattered here and there along the ridge which bounded the western horizon. ”

“ There is no tree in the field, and the low hedge can shelter nothing; but bordering the next, on rather higher ground, is an ash copse, with some few spruce firs. Resting on a rail in the shadow of these firs, a light air now and again draws along beside the nut-tree bushes of the hedge, the cooler atmosphere of the shadow, perhaps [Pg 82] causes it. Faint as it is, it sways the heavy laden brome grass, but is not strong enough to lift a ball of thistledown from the bennets among which it is entangled. ”

“ We may say they planted better than they knew: they planted once, and many and many a hedge—unnumbered miles and leagues of hedges—that are now great belts of thicket, were first planted by man in the remote past. Nature took over the thin row of thorn seedlings and made it what it is, not only the useful thing it was intended for—a natural barbed-wire entanglement—but a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. ”

“ Some (as we noted) mingle their very hedges with oaklings, ash, and fruit-trees, sown or planted, and ’tis a laudable improvement; though others do rather recommend to us sets of all one sort, and will not so much as admit of the black-thorn to be mingled with the white, because of their unequal progress; and indeed, timber-trees set in the hedge (though contemporaries with it) do frequently wear it out; and therefore I should rather encourage such plantations to be at some yards distance, near the verges, than perpendicularly in them. ”

“ Unfortunately, except in a few localities, our climate does not encourage the perfect development of the choicest of the evergreen hedge-plants, and yet with time we can produce some moderately fine effects in hedges. We may not hope soon to rival the best of the foreign gardens that have been maturing through generations of continuous care. ”

“ It is a bad plan to allow a hedge of any kind, especially an evergreen one, to run a number of years without trimming. If a hedge is neglected so long, and then severely pruned, it will look stubby and shabby for a year or two after. ”

“ If the farmer plants a few trees so that he may one day eat an apple of his own growing and sit in the shade, he must build a wall eight or ten feet high to protect them from the salt blast, and he may then die of old age before the apple is ripe or the shade created. Nor can he grow a hedge: the furze, it is true, abounds everywhere, but it is a most intractable plant that will go (or grow) its own wild way, and no man has yet subdued it to his will and made it serve as a hedge. ”

“ Such a hedge is not only ornamental, but it yields endless material for cutting. It should be allowed to grow quite 4 feet thick, and is best formed with a backbone of stiff woody shrubs, such as Guelder Roses, Ribes, and Lilac, while between the stiffer shrubs might be some that are weaker, such as Kerria, Rhodotypus, and Leycesteria. Plants of rank rambling growth, such as free Roses and double-flowered Brambles, Aristolochia, Wistaria, Virginia Creeper, and the rambling Honeysuckles, are not in place in such a hedge ”

“ When they reach that height, they grow by sending strong shoots out from the stems near the ground; and thus the hedge is ever growing thicker—another excellent feature. If pruned, they make a first-class hedge; if totally neglected, they are still protective. Plants three or four years old seed, so that in a few years, with moderate encouragement, plants in abundance could be obtained.
Besides its protective value, the plant has a very beautiful appearance. The under side of the leaf, as well as the young growing branches, are silvery ”

“ When planting time arrives drain off the water and mix the seed with dry sand and sow it thinly in drills in good soil. When the plants are up hoe them and keep them clean or work them with a cultivator, if on a sufficiently large scale. The first season’s growth should make them large enough to set in a hedge. They can remain standing in the seed-bed until spring and then be lifted early to be planted. Cut back the tops and the roots so that each shall be about five inches in length. The ground where the hedge is to stand should be well prepared by deep plowing, and dragging fine and smooth. ”