We’re slowly learning more and more about our garden. We’re coming up to two years in our home and I’m surprised by how many nuances there are in what is essentially a field with a few beds turning it loosely into a garden and a veg area which feels like it is constantly under attack from the local rabbit population. We’re on to the third reshuffle of the garden furniture this Spring - it started off on the patio but we found that was mostly a mixture of a suntrap (it sounds positive I know but I have the palest skin and prefer to spend most of my summer sat in the shade) and a big wind tunnel as it sits between the house and the garage. Then we moved it to under the largest of the cherry trees (a good compromise on the whole sun and shade thing and very pretty). The area is quite exposed though and the furniture is more of a lounging nature so it just didn’t feel quite right. This Spring we’ve moved it to this more natural corner - the tall hedgerow is behind and to one side are the two smaller cherry trees so it feels cocooned in greenery.
It’s also that bit further from the road that runs in front of the house so it feels quieter and more private. It’s given me a whole new view of the plants and trees and a little sunshine one weekend meant I had a chance to sip a very indulgent smoothie and sketch this drawing of one of the alder trees.
The alder sits as part of the hedgerow that divides our garden from the field next door. It’s thick with a mixture of alders, one willow, blackthorn (I think), dogwood, hawthorn and hazelnut. In places you can see where it has been pruned and pollarded in the past with multiple branches shooting up out of the trunk. We did a manual prune in our first year here, using the cut branches to build a dead hedge at the bottom of the garden and semi-plug some of the larger gaps in that hedgerow. Last year though we left it alone (mostly due to a lack of time in the cutting season) and now its branches reach high up into the sky. It’s too beautiful to shorten or thin. It can support so much wildlife and as we walk along ours we can see the multiple birds nests that have been built between the branches. Birds flit in and out of it all day long, insects are drawn to to the flowers that bloom through spring and we know that somewhere lives at least one hedgehog (you can learn a lot from droppings left across the grass!). I’m sure there are more species living in it but these are what we have seen so far. Right now the hawthorn is in full blossom, its tiny white flowers sprinkling across it and the smell is the most wonderful of fragrances.
Last year, surrounding myself with photo upon photo of other people’s flowers, I found myself wanting a space in the garden where I too could grow these incredible specimens without damage from the local rabbits and deer. The hedgerow was simply a green backdrop, unappreciated because of its failure to provide that wow moment. I’ve made that protected space now and the tulips and daffodils that have flourished in it have been truly spectacular and of course have provided food and a home for some insects. Yet removed from all the photographs I’ve had fresh eyes and mind to look upon the hedgerow. Watching it return to life from its winter slumber I have grown a new appreciation for it. It cannot grow in one season, from tiny bulb to full grown plant. This is years of growing, something that cannot be hurried or accelerated only patiently lived. It is unassuming and yet upon closer inspection there is an intricate structure, the tiny delicate blossoms and that fragrance that fills the air and lifts your heart straight into the season. It’s not home to a few but home to many: this isn’t something that is there to be looked at, it’s something to be lived in, to provide sustenance and life to creature upon creature. Each part of it sits happily alongside the other. If you divided it up into its component plants you would have many trees but would cease to have a hedgerow. They must sit together to become something more and sit next to and weave into each other which they seem to happily do. It is, quite frankly, magnificent and in its way, very humbling. I am coming to love this hedgerow and I think it might just change how I treat the rest of this garden/field that we have.