We have half a dozen mature hazels (Corylus avellana) that survived here for being out of reach of the grazing. They cling to the banks of the brook opposite our neighbour’s wood and were protected by a run of barbed wire that kept the cattle from the brook’s edge and, in turn, provided the trees with their own little sanctuary. Their domain, very sensibly, was over the water and into the shade, but it is remarkable how quickly a change of regime is marked in growth and, in the eight years without the cattle, their limbs have reached back over our land so that that you now have to duck as you approach. In their shadow I have been planting snowdrops, which like the moisture there in the winter and the drier influence of their roots in the summer.
The pools of catkin and snowdrop have made new places that we are drawn to explore when the winter is with us. Look down now on the wood from our perch on the hillside and the pale golden cast of the catkins reveal where the hazels run. Happy to live in the understory of the tall poplars above them, their rangy limbs topple like collapsed scaffolding where they have gone without coppicing, but you can read their preference for the hinterland. At the edges of the wood and where they step out from the high canopy and finger up the brook in the open crease at the bottom of the slopes, they look most contented. The billowing outline of one tree running into another reveals their true character and shows you where they thrive. Huddled on the edge of the wood where it is still and moist and sheltered.
Walk the line of the hedges up the slope away from the wood and you find hazel here too. Nuts that were buried by squirrels and forgotten, but happy to be part of the hedgerow and its community. It is impossible to tell the age of the hazels that sit in the hedge, for they will take a regular cut and regenerate as a shrub rather than a tree, but they are probably as old as their cousins in the wood. Further up the hill again, where some of the hedges along the ditch were nothing more than a twist of barbed wire and bramble, it is often the hazel that has outlived its neighbours. By disentangling the wire from the bushes that had been habitually scalped by the flail and then kept in check by the cattle, a number have been freed and left to regenerate. Although you can see the previous brutal regime in their eldest limbs, they have shot from the base as hazels do and, in just eight years, we have the beginnings of a new grove.
Where I come from on the South Downs, the ancient coppices contain trees that are thought to be as much as a thousand years old. The original stumps have rotted away from the middle, but you can see the oldest plants in the coppice mapped in the close groupings of offsets that have radiated outward over time. New trees that have been deliberately layered (that is, rooted by bending the longest shoots to the ground and weighting them with a stone) stand at a sensible distance of about eight strides to give them room enough, but still with the company they need to draw new growth up and straight towards the light.
Coppicing extends the life of a tree and the industry around it traces our woodland symbiosis in a long and unbroken line of charcoal production as well as material for hurdles, furniture and building. Cut on an eight to twelve year rotation, a hazel coppice will regenerate fast, the trees touching again in four or five years, but not before a valuable interlude of light has been allowed to reach the woodland floor. Ephemeral woodlanders such as foxgloves seize this window of opportunity and bluebells, wood anemone and primroses take the chance to build up their strength before being cast once again into more permanent shade.
The best material from coppicing, which retains its pliability, is cut at the beginning of the winter. Later cuts between January and March produce wood that is prone to brittleness. The finer top growth is used for pea sticks, faggots and withies. The rods, which can run straight to four metres, are either split and used for hurdle making and building materials or, in my case, for plant supports in the kitchen garden. A twelve year rotation will also produce firewood. The brash and less useful brush is piled or woven over the coppiced stump to prevent the deer from nibbling the regenerating shoots. A year will see new growth push clear of the grazing line before the brash has rotted and returned to the ground.
In the second winter here, having seen where the wild trees were happiest, I planted a grove of filberts and cobs below the new orchard. Cobs are Corylus avellana selections, filberts Corylus maxima. Though very similar in appearance to the native hazel, they are chosen for their superior nuts and are distinctive for their crested outer calyx. There are twenty one trees, three of each of seven varieties; ‘Webb’s Prize’, ‘Gunslebert’, ‘Kentish Cob’, ‘Cosford Cob’, ‘White Filbert’, ‘Butler’ and, naturally, ‘Pearson’s Prolific’. Though to date the squirrels have stripped them just days before we consider them ripe enough for our own consumption, we remain hopeful that in time we will get enough nuts to go round.
Staggered in an informal grid of eight metre spacing, the trees sit in grass and take the formality of the orchard down to meet the wood. For now they are protected with tree guards, so that I can let the sheep graze amongst them, but in time, when the canopy closes over, I will fence the nuttery in and bring the woodland floor into this area. Further downstream, a new informal coppice of straight hazel is set to join the mature trees that run the length of the stream. In five years’ time I am hoping they will be big enough to coppice. A cycle which may be repeated many times in the life of these young trees. Only a handful of times by me, but hopefully many more with their legacy.
Words: Dan Pearson/Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 2 February 2019
The farmer here before us had grazed the land hard with the precious pasture or ‘grub’ taking precedence over the trees. Our neighbour has shown us photos of the valley when she was a girl, unrecognisable for the majestic elms in every hedge. When the elms came down during the 1960’s and ’70’s, their demise opened up the landscape and, save a handful of mature ash that run along the lane, the hedges have remained low and uninterrupted. On his last winter here, the year before we took over the land in 2010, the farmer scaled the solitary ash that stands proud on the slopes of The Tump and pollarded it back to its torso. The ancient pollards are a feature of the valley, for ash (Fraxinus excelsior) burns green and so is a valuable wood for winter fires. Our limbless pollard stood starkly that first November, just a small amount of regrowth marking the time the property had taken to come into our hands. Representing, as it did, the end of an era and the start of a new chapter, we immediately marked about thirty hedgerow ash so that, when the hedges were cut, they would be left to rise up and away to become new hedge trees. Though not a brilliant hedging plant, ash in a hedge are more than happy to take a yearly cut and, with the advantage of being already established in the hedge, they have raced away. In that first winter I planted another thirty ash whips that were winkled in where gaps opened up after removing elder and bramble. The young whips have to be watched for the first three years as they have competition for light and water from the hedge to either side, but as soon as they were tall enough I tied a ribbon to their leader so that the farmer who cuts our hedges can work around them.
The old ash pollard on The Tump has now been joined by a number of self-seeded hawthorns
One of the ash planted eight years ago on the slopes above the old pollard, the top of which can be seen in the background
Three of the ash planted eight years ago into the hedge on the lane
It was a good plan, or so I thought, to have my hedge trees on a ten year rotation and pollard enough every year to fuel our wood burners. The spectre of ash dieback was first confirmed in the UK just two years later in 2012 and it is now sobering to think how quickly things can change. We discovered the first signs in some seedling trees about three years later and, although none of the trees I planted have been affected yet, my own plans of ash pollards are now in question. And then, as with the disappearance of the elms, there is the visual change we will inevitably see in the landscape, since ash is such a key and widespread component of our woodlands.
The initial panic that circulated in the press soon after the discovery of Chalara eased a little while we waited to see what happened. However, caused as it is by a fungus with wind-borne spores, it has taken only 6 years to become widespread and is now present in most of the country, bar the north of Scotland. What has become clear is that, once a tree is infected, the disease is usually fatal. However, mature trees can survive for some time and during that time they continue to make a valuable contribution to the local ecology and landscape. Ash are also profligate with their seed and scientific study into variability has already shown that a small number of trees are able to tolerate or resist infection.
Hopefully the strong will win out and, with that belief, my plans seem not entirely without hope. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that diversity is important and that no one environment should have all its eggs in the same basket. With this in mind, I have been widening my net and, every year since we came, I have made it a mission to broaden the palette of native trees on the land. There are several projects on the go and winter work includes hedge improvement and extension and the finding of places for long-termers that can step into the fields without making them difficult to manage with machinery.
A newly planted oak has a temporary tree guard
A gate marker oak planted 4 years ago
Every year I have planted a handful of English oaks (Quercus robur), using them as markers by gates (main image, the large trees are ash) so that you can both locate the breaks in the hedges from a distance and to make a place of the gate; a place to stop in the shade or somewhere for the animals to gather in the heat of the day. Although with climate change there is some speculation as to the long-term suitability of oak in Southern England, my hope is that the combination of our hearty soil and the spring lines that run through the slopes will give them their best chance. Oak has the highest biodiversity count of all native trees and so I am also planning for the life that comes with them.
As gaps have opened up as I upgrade our old hedgelines by stripping them of dominant runs of bramble, elder and old man’s beard, I have been adding common lime to replace the ash should they fail as hedge trees. Tilia x europaea is a beautiful tree if you have the room, not just for its vibrant leaf colour, but for the perfume of the flowers and the benefit these have for the bees and us, as it comes in quantity and makes a delicious tea. Once again, the trees will need extra care and, with this in mind, I made sure they were all planted before the end of the year so that their hair roots can get the best possible chance of being in contact with the soil before the spring. The trees were also given a good mulch of compost to hold in the moisture.
One of the new limes planted as hedge trees
Hedge trees are space efficient and their presence along the lanes as another storey above the hedgeline produces protected microclimates and a stillness that harbours insects. The bats run through these fertile air pockets, using them as feeding corridors, as do the birds that benefit from cover from predators. When we first arrived here one of the first things we noticed was the lack of birdlife near the house, with no trees and scalped hedges. We have quickly seen them return, as the trees have risen up to provide shelter, shade and perches for chatter or prey-watching.
Part of the area of hornbeam and hazel coppice on the lower slopes of The Tump above the stream, which were planted 4 and 5 years ago
Dan putting tree guards on the newly planted coppice of hazel and sweet chestnut
For the last five years I have been slowly extending a new coppice in the hollow where the field dips away too steeply to the stream edge for haymaking. Thirty trees a year now sees the beginnings of something. Oak, to form a high canopy, and hornbeam and hazel, which will be put on a coppice rotation of twelve and eight to ten years respectively. This year I added some sweet chestnut to see if we can harvest our own poles for fencing in years to come. The coppice will provide the firewood I might be short of should the ash fail, and species variation within it will be good for ringing the changes in the ecology as we work from end to end over the course of a cycle.
It is a good feeling to this year have reached the end of the planted area and to be able to look back from the little whips which have just gone in to the progress mapped in year-on-year growth on the slopes beyond. This next chapter is begun.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 January 2019 In 1997 I witnessed my first and never to be forgotten hanami. I was in Japan filming a series for Channel 4 and we arrived there at cherry blossom season to witness this important cultural connection to the natural world. The blossom forecast or ‘cherry blossom front’ announced by the weather bureau charted the daily progress as the opening blossom moved up the archipelago, so that parties could be planned in celebration.
We arrived in Kyoto with perfect timing, just as the first buds were beginning to open. The streets in the old town were lined with the sakura trees and the beautifully manicured limbs reached from behind garden walls and dipped down to hover above the pavements. As the week went on and the buds opened, a skim of petals began to pool on the dark water of the tree-lined canals and, with the mounting crescendo of bloom, came the parties of people that gathered under the branches. During the day the sakura made pale, luminous cloudscapes of blossom in the parks. By evening, for the night viewing of yozakura, they were illuminated with lanterns. Picnic blankets, almost touching like towels on a crowded beach, shadowed the canopies of the trees and the Japanese partied with sake and merriment to welcome the spring.
My most memorable blossom viewing was a trip we made to a cherry tree nursery. We had been instructed to visit in the afternoon to look at the trees in the fields and, with perfect timing, at dusk we were escorted to their king tree. This was their most magnificent Yoshino cherry, pruned over decades to form a wonderful canopy of limbs which were illuminated from below by a number of flaming braziers. The flickering light caught the first flower and, as darkness descended beyond the branches, we were held transfixed in a moment of absolute perfection. Sugary pink bud, a scattering of just opened flower and all the promise of what was yet to come in the season’s change. A metaphor for life that everyone there understood. Intense, breath-taking beauty, yet fleeting and ephemeral.
The Yoshino cherry (Prunus x yedoensis) is perhaps my favourite of all cherries and I have made room for one here, so that we too can celebrate the arrival of spring. Last weekend was our equivalent moment, with bud and expectation of flower. Today as I write, it is in full blossom and droning with honeybees. Though it is undoubtedly ornamental, with a live, bright pink to the bud, this rapidly pales as the flowers open. They are single, but massed on elegant growth, which reaches to form a widely-domed tree. I have planted a multi-stemmed tree here by the trough in front of the house so that, for the two weeks that it is in season, it is free to take centre stage. In time its limbs will reach out so that it can be doubly appreciated in the water. First in reflection and then with the petals scattered on the surface.
Although as a general rule I prefer to plant small, I invested in an air-pot grown specimen from Deepdale Trees for this key position. The airpot system encourages a dense and fibrous root system and, as a consequence, results in quick establishment. The Yoshino cherry is well-known for its wind tolerance and so far has done well here with our lack of shelter. Where the habit of some cherries can be stiff, the movement in the limbs and its arching growth make this a supremely elegant tree. It has a second season too with tiny cherries that the birds strip fast when they are ready and, in a good autumn, bright foliage of orange, russet and red.
It is important to dedicate some time to be with the tree when it has this moment. Stopping to look up into the energy caught in the blossom, take in the gentle perfume and the industry of the bees making the most of this early larder, time slows and the abundance and energy of spring are brought sharply into focus.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 14 April 2018
The hamamelis have burst their tight, velvety buds. Huddled darkly along bare branches, it is as if they have waited until we are hungry, our appetites pining for a break with winter. Welcome for the absence of life elsewhere, I fall under their spell again yearly, without fail and willingly. I first encountered them in maturity at Wisley, where in winter they were a mainstay of the winter plant idents, but it was not until my early twenties that I saw the true potential of the witch hazels. My friend Isabelle had taken me to Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium to meet the owner, Jelena de Belder, the grower of many witch hazels and breeder of several of the best. The first, ‘Ruby Glow’ amongst them, were planted at the arboretum in the 1930s and the De Belders started their own breeding programme in the ’50’s. By the time we saw her collection in the early eighties, they were reaching out in maturity to touch one another, their fiery limbs, on a deep February winter’s day, an unforgettable understorey. The branches were bare and filled with the light of a million tiny filaments. The darkest as deep and red as rubies, and from there running through fire colours from the glow of smouldering embers to incandescent gold, flame yellow and palest sulphur. Writing now with a sprig of ‘Barmstedt Gold’ on the table in front of me, so that I can look in close detail, I remember further back to Geraldine’s Hamamelis mollis. Our neighbour, and my gardening mentor when I was a child, always picked a sprig to enliven her winter table. We would marvel at the strength of the perfume and its combination of delicacy and brazenness pitted against the odds of winter. So my witch hazel affair goes far back, but now is the first real opportunity I’ve had to put a shrub in open ground and be happy in the expectation of its future.
Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Barmstedt Gold’
Hamamelis mollis
Before here, in the Peckham garden, I grew hamamelis in pots, because there simply wasn’t space in the beds. They were surprisingly tolerant and it afforded me the opportunity of bringing them up close to the house in the winter to watch their buds unravel at close proximity. ‘Jelena’, a soft orange Hamamelis x intermedia hybrid named after Mme. de Belder, was always the first to flower, before Christmas in London and running through the length of January. It outgrew me, its limbs reaching wide and elegantly in a stretch that became harder and harder to accommodate when I moved it back into the semi-shade at the end of the garden. In the end I gave it away to Nigel Slater when creating a secret garden for him. A good home where I knew he would enjoy it, and every year I am delighted to see him post pictures of the first flowers on Instagram.
H. x intermedia ‘Gingerbread’ (main image) and ‘Barmstedt Gold’, together with a plant of Hamamelis mollis, a gift from Geraldine, came with me from Peckham to here in pots. The intermedia hybrids produce the greater bulk of the coloured varieties but, though they are scented, not all have the pervasive scent of the straight H. mollis. It is often something you have to find and put your nose to, which is why it is worth placing them in a sheltered corner which will hold the perfume, or upwind of where you know you are going to pass. Growing most happily in open woodland, they are adaptable to being out in the open as long as their roots are kept cool and moist in the summer months, and will flower more heavily in the light. Scorched edges to the foliage will show you that they have been under stress and if, like me, you have no choice but to grow them in an open position, this can be alleviated with a summer mulch and long, deep watering when it gets dry.
The books will tell you that they prefer acid soil, but I have found them to be tolerant of alkaline conditions, as long as they have plenty of organic matter in the ground, do not dry out in summer nor lie wet in winter. However, what few books tell you is that they can be short-lived if they find themselves under stress. A tree of thirty years is doing well if you force them too far beyond their comfort zone. They are also slow to attain size, or feel slow because you have an image of wide-spreading limbs in your mind, not the stark twiggery of a young plant. In five to seven years you can begin to see the plant as you want it to be, but if you spend a little more than you’re comfortable with, seeking out a 10 or 15 litre plant that has some substance, the immediate payback is worth it. This year’s purchases – I find it very difficult to resist extending my experience of witch hazels – saw the instant benefits of a waist high ‘Aphrodite’ for nearly £40 and a twig of ‘Orange Peel’ for £15.
Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Aphrodite’
Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Diane’
Choosing the very best of a bewilderingly beautiful bunch is not easy, but my dabbling over the years has been worth it, for the named varieties have very differing habits. Being red-green colour blind, and losing some but not all reds, I must try hard to find ‘Diane’ when planted out in a garden. Up close I can see it is a wonderful colour and often use it for clients, but it is not one that I gravitate to for myself. It has a well-behaved, rounded habit and reliably scarlet autumn foliage, which singles it out as a variety to return to for two seasons of interest.
Several of the intermedia hybrids are problematic in my opinion for not losing leaves in winter, hanging on too long, like hornbeam or beech, to clutter what should be a naked stage of branches for the flowers. I have found that they do this in some gardens and not others and often they grow out of it as they mature, but I prefer the varieties that drop properly and most enjoy those that colour well in the autumn.
Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Gingerbread’
My plants here will be happy in our retentive loam despite the exposure, but I do mulch heavily with compost to emulate their natural wooded habitat. They have been planted here not only for the winter draw they provide, but also for the benefit of shade they bring to plants around them come summer. Rooting lightly and without heavy competition, they will provide home to spring flowering pulmonaria and erythronium which will come as they fade. The foliage of ‘Gingerbread’ has a copper flush as it comes into leaf, which is good with the Bath Asparagus planted beneath it, but later in the summer the branches provide a frame for Tropaeolum speciosum. The Flame Flower makes the branches flare again, when I have all but forgotten the winter spell that I am bewitched by today.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 27 January 2018 This year we have based ourselves here for three full weeks to see out the last of December and welcome in the new year. Your eye is free to travel further in this wintry landscape and it has been good to follow by venturing beyond our boundaries. Slowly – for it took a few days to get into the routine of it – a walk has started the day. We have been both up and down the valley and high onto the exposed ground of Freezing Hill to experience the roar of the wind in the beeches and to understand why it has its name, as it whips up the slopes that run down the other side to Bristol. Always looking back to see how we fit into the folds, we have contributed to our knowledge of muddy ways, well-worn tracks, breaks in hedges and crossing points back and forth across the ditches and streams. Marking our way – for nearly every field has at least one – are the ancient ash pollards.
Ash wood burns green so the trees have value and owning enough pollards would keep you in firewood if you attended to them in rotation. The pollards regenerate easily from cuts made above the grazing line, so that they can grow away again unhindered by the cattle. Usually standing solitary on a steeply sloping pasture (where they add to their usefulness by providing summer shade for livestock) the pollards are stunted by decades of decapitation and, in combination, make an extraordinary trail of characters in the landscape.
We have stopped at each one to take in their histories and their winter slumbers that expose their distinct personalities. Some are hollow to the core, the new limbs surviving on little more than a thin rim of bark. Inside the hollows map the decay and hold the damp and the smell of it even in the dry months. The halo of new growth that breaks from the old forms a crown of fresh limbs that in ten or twelve years are big enough for harvesting. To date the cycle has continued until the trees are exhausted and split and fail.
Of course, we are waiting patiently to see if the pollards survive the chalara dieback that is moving across the country and is already in the valley. Neighbours who have lived here a lifetime recount how different the landscape was when the elms rose up in the hedgerows, but it is the ash and their potential demise that will now be cause for a new perspective.
The solitary ash pollard on The Tump
We have a solitary pollard on the west facing slopes of The Tump. The farmer who lived here before us climbed the tree to harvest the wood in the year he died. The tree must have been huge once, the trunk striking the form of an imposing female torso. An interesting presence given the fact that the ash was once seen as the feminine counterpart to the father tree, the oak. When we arrived here there was just a summer’s regrowth and I set to immediately planting thirty new ash in the hedgerows to provide us with our own rotation. So far – and I remain hopeful – they have done well, despite our mother tree showing a reluctance to throw out another set of limbs and the forecasts that estimate a five percent survival for ash in this country.
We have let the grass grow long on the slopes that are too steep for haymaking around our pollard and in six years there are the beginnings of a new habitat. An elder has sprung from high in her crown and a black and sinister fungus from the side that has refused to regrow branches. Around her there is a skirt of bramble and young hawthorns where the birds have previously settled in her branches and stopped to poop. I plan to plant an oak I grew from an acorn amongst them. New life around the old and a suitable partner, I hope, for a changeable future.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
December reveals the bones of the landscape. Mud where there was grass, bare stems where there was foliage and, by this late in the year, almost everything drawn back and in retreat. Not so the Glastonbury Thorn. Missing the winterising gene that triggers dormancy and stirring when there is barely enough light or warmth to sustain growth above ground, Crataegus monogyna ‘Biflora’ is pushing against the flow. A scattering of young foliage is greening limbs that only recently were fully clothed and a push of pale flowers braving the elements.
Flowering twice, once in spring in celebration of the resurrection and then again at Christmas to mark the birth of Jesus, the habits of the Glastonbury Thorn are understandably surrounded by legend. Joseph of Arimathea was reputed to have visited Glastonbury with the Holy Grail. Thrusting his staff into Wearyall Hill it sprouted and grew into the original tree which, for superstitious reasons, was cut down and burned during the English Civil War. A subsequent tree (planted from cuttings taken by locals and fostered since then in the area) replaced it in 1951, only to be vandalised in December 2010. Its limbs were crudely dismembered and subsequent growth the following March was mysteriously rubbed out. Then, on 1st April 2012 a sapling grafted from a descendant of the pre-1951 specimen was planted again on the site, only to be snapped in half and irreparably damaged sixteen days later.
The Glastonbury Thorn by the orchard gate
As I like a story, and the thought of sweetening a sad one, I set out to find a tree when we moved here to give the magical thorn another stronghold. As all the plants are reputed to come from grafts taken from the original tree, the search revealed how few people grow it and how hard it is to find. Our friend and fellow gardener, Hannah, made me a present of one for my fiftieth birthday and now here it is, by the gate to the pear orchard, in all it’s curiosity.
Though a branch growing in the Churchyard of St. John’s, Glastonbury is taken to the Queen every year on December the 8th by the Vicar and Mayor of Glastonbury, I am too superstitious myself to pick a sprig for the house. Folklore has it that it is unlucky to bring hawthorn over the threshold and, to compound the story, they say the original tree took out the eye of the man who felled it during the Civil War. I like my tree where it is because the flowers draw me out into a closing-down landscape, which is charged just a little by their miraculous show on the darkest days of the year.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
It has been a good year for the hawthorn. It is foaming still up the hedge lines and cascading out of the woods above the stream at the bottom of the hill. We have gravitated there in the evening sunshine to stand at the bottom of the slope and marvel. The trees have been drawn up tall and slender and the froth of creamy flowers brightening the shadows of the newly sprung wood. At the margins of the wood, their favoured place, the branches push out wide and low, a hum of insects enticed by an uncountable sum of flower.The hawthorns saw the apples come and go and now they are starting to dim, it is summer. Why they were as weighted so heavily with flower this year I do not know, but it is the best they have been since we arrived here and I am pleased I have planted them as plentifully.
Haw, May, Quick, Quickset; hawthorn is a tree surrounded in folklore. Cut one and you will be plagued by fairies, but turn the milk with a twig before churning and you will protect the cheese from bewitchment. According to Teutonic legend, the tree originated from a bolt of lightning, which is why the wood was used on funeral pyres. The power of the sacred fire was sure to ferry your spirit to heaven.
In ancient rituals the hawthorn symbolised the renewal of nature and fertility, which often made it the choice for a maypole at Beltane. The wood itself is one of the hardest and often used for fine engraving and the young leaves are surprisingly delicious in a salad, with a fresh nutty taste.
The flowers, however, smell both sweet and stale. Some find this unpleasant, but to my nose it is just a country smell, which attracts flies and insects that lay their eggs on decaying animal matter. Crataegus is well known for the diversity of species that live within the thorny cage of its branches or on the bark or the foliage so, despite the superstition around it, it is a mainstay of the countryside.
I have relied upon it as the greater component when replanting my native mixed hedges. It is called Quick with good reason and the hedges that I planted to gap up our broken boundaries five years ago are already six feet high, thick and impenetrable. I wonder how elderly some of the thorns are in the oldest of the hedges here. It is estimated that 200,000 miles of them were planted between 1750 and 1850 as a result of the Enclosure Acts. During this time there were nurseries committed to growing the hawthorn in quantity to meet the demand, and making a small fortune from the supply.
If you leave your hedges and cut them year on, year off, the hawthorn flowers and fruits more heavily. Leave a tree free-standing and it will be reliably heavy with dark red berry in October. The berry is the way to propagate. I leave them for as long as I dare before taking my share, for the birds will suddenly strip a tree when the fruits ripen. The digestive juices of birds help to break the inbuilt dormancy of the seed, but you can simulate this by leaving the berries to ferment for a week in water before lining out in a drill in the garden. Some may germinate the following year after the action of frost has worked its magic, but two years of stratification may be required before you get a full row to germinate. Within a year of germinating you will have young plants a foot or so tall, in two whips ready to make a hedge. Or the beginnings of a maypole.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
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