Five years ago, a documentary about the Duchy of Cornwall featured the then Prince of Wales in tweeds and jaunty red gauntlets laying a hawthorn hedge. It was a brilliant piece of PR. If Charles was a safe pair of hands with a hedge – something as quintessentially English as a hay meadow or a millpond – he was surely a safe pair of hands full stop.
A cuckoo in one breeding season needs to eat about 22,500 hairy caterpillars
Focusing on a hedge in south-west Wiltshire, Hedgelands combines history, celebration, lament and warning. Christopher Hart is a companionable writer, and makes a powerful case that, at a time of ecological hazard, well-nurtured hedges can play an astonishing role in buttressing the future.
First, though, the past. There is evidence of hedge-laying in this country going back 4,500 years, and ‘Judith’s Hedge’ in Cambridgeshire is at least 900 years old – older than either Windsor Castle or Westminster Abbey.
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