Trees on the edge

Our front hedgerow – its trees so far apart and untidy that it could almost be called a grove – has gotten tangled in the phone wires, and when the winds whip across the bog-lands as they did last week I hear them creaking loudly, pulling the wires alarmingly to and fro. Last week’s storm pulled down one of our trees already, and I’m expecting the overhead wires to go any day now.

It’s not safe for me to trim them myself, so I called some tree surgeons I know, but the trees are on the border of our land, next to the road along the canal – so they said the phone company had to do it. The phone company, in turn, said it was the responsibility of Irish waterways, who said it was the responsibility of the county, and so on.

I often talk about the kind of close-knit communities that have disappeared across most of the modern world and are fading even here. One disadvantage to them, though, is that people tend to look out for those people they know, and prioritise everyone else last. Also, Ireland only recently went from being a slow and agrarian country to being a modern globalised nation, and many civil servants still behave as though they still live in that slow country. Thus, I’ve spent months making calls to various people, finding that delicate balance between building a relationship with the people there and having them file a harassment order against me.

Finally the council said they would do it, to my great appreciation. They can’t tell me exactly when they will do so, and I wonder what it will look like when they’re done, whether they will simply trim a bit from the top or raze the front of our property like a tornado ripping off tree trunks.

Whatever they do, however, it will probably help me in my ongoing struggle to turn this untidy clump of trees into a proper hedgerow. In the past I’ve planted willow saplings in the gaps, lain rotting planks underneath to feed the soil and keep down weeds, and have cut and folded saplings to repair the hedge and make it whole again. 

If it sounds like I’m talking about repairing a hedgerow as one would repair a wall or tractor, that’s because the principles are similar, except that the hedgerow is a living thing – patches grow out of control or die off if not maintained, and it must be repaired a bit at a time over years. By hedgerow, I don’t mean the decorative evergreen sculptures I see in front of modern businesses, often a monoculture of invasive species. I mean lines of densely-planted trees – fast-growing breeds like willow, elder, hazel, birch, chestnut, pine, hawthorn, blackthorn and rowan – cut, folded and woven together into a wall of greenery.

The principle of a hedgerow is simple, but hedge-laying was an art form in traditional Ireland and England. Every year farmers would take a few days out to maintain their hundreds of metres of hedge, re-weaving or pruning the new growth, and each area had its own style and tricks. Ireland has hedge-laying associations, contests and awards, and some farmers take pride in maintaining the same hedges that have existed for decades or centuries.

Typically the hedge-layer takes each upward-pointing sapling, holds it at whatever height he wants the hedge to be, and cuts diagonally downward through the wood – but only partway. He then lays everything above the cut down horizontally, often weaving it through the other saplings and beating the woven branches down with a club until they were densely matted. A bit of bark and wood still connects the top and bottom of the tree, so the top remains alive and growing even as it lies flat amid many other branches. In this way, the weave itself gets thicker over time, until it is an impenetrable barrier of living wood.

They add variety to fields that would otherwise go sterile. Each plant adds its own chemicals and removes its own nutrients from the soil, so fields of monoculture need to be continually fertilised. Single crops provide our bodies, too, with a single set of nutrients, and only at certain times of year. They also encourage a glut of certain animals, like pests that eat our crops, and offer no homes to the birds and insectivores who would eat the pests.

Hedgerows, however, give your garden a third dimension, a vertical salad bar that middle-aged and elderly can reach with a minimum of back pain. Unlike field crops, it provides for much of the year; hawthorn shoots for salads in March, linden leaves in April, elderflowers in June, rose hips in August, blackberries in September and sloes in October.

Whatever kind of job they do on our trees, I’ll get home from work that night and look at the remains – and start trimming and weaving the rest into a vertical garden, planting the things that will help feed my family when they are older, and pulling and pushing the rest into a solid wall for security and privacy. When I see it, I’ll have my hedge-laying schedule for years to come laid in front of me. 

The Land in February

Sunset in winter. You can see the row of stumps in the foreground.

We’re seeing an unseasonably warm winter here in Ireland, with the temperature in the double-digits in February (Centigrade, of course – 10 degrees Centigrade is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit), and the days have been unusually dry until last week, when we got what locals call “soft days” of drizzle and mud.

I stopped by to visit my neighbour Seamus, now 86 years old and still tending a half-acre or so of vegetables. He grew up here in the bog, in the shadow of the Hill of Allen, worked for years cutting turf – the millennia-old compacted peat moss that the Irish use for fuel – and retired to a home a kilometre or so from where he was born. He can tell me which plants do well next to each other, what time of day the cows graze in different fields and why, and what kind of seasonal weather brings out the best flavours in his fruits – the kind of intimate land-knowledge that all humans once had, and only a few do anymore. He used to know the weather better, he says, but it feels different than it used to.

He gave me several cuttings from his gooseberry bushes, and this weekend I’ll be building new beds for them down at the back of our property. It was there that we had rows of lilandia trees that blocked the low winter sun, and a few years ago we cut them all down – it means we get more of the fierce winds that whip across the bog-lands here, but I’m happy with the exchange.

The cows gather to watch hungrily when I or The Girl mow the lawn.

On the other hand, our neighbour’s cows now have only a barbed-wire fence blocking their passage to our garden, so I’ve been planting something more substantial that will keep growing after the fence has rusted. We cut unwanted sapIings from our garden and wrapped them between the trunks to make a wattle-fence, and I’ve been building garden beds along the lilandia stumps and planting Seamus’ gooseberry bushes, whose thorns should discourage the cows.

We also planted the apple trees we grafted, and I’ll be uprooting our logan-berry vines and wrapping them around the stumps. The apple trees should block the upper deck and the thorn-bushes the understory, leaving a wall of vegetation that will reduce the wind yet not block the sun. The only gap in this wall will be taken up by the bee-hive, and if the cows want to try to get through that, the bees will have something to say about it.

The days are getting longer again, and our garden remains only half-built; we tore it all down last year, as the planks had rotted through, and we arranged to rebuild the entire thing in brick. It’s a slow process, though, and while we completed one of the beds and have been using its bounty through the winter, the other beds lie fallow; I’ve been removing the weeds and covering them in cardboard to see that we don’t spend all our time weeding in summers to come.

I spent the weekend pulling blackberry brambles from the crannies of the land; they grow profusely here, their fruits consumed voraciously by birds in the autumn and their seeds spread across the fields. They are also quite aggressive plants, worming through bushes and hedgerows, wrapping their vines around trees, climbing to the light or descending back to earth, where they turn into root systems for new plants. Worst of all, they hide among the lush greenery of Irish summers, unseen until their hooks have ripped your clothes or flesh.

Thus, in the winter, when the knee-deep tangle of other plants have died away or shrivelled to brown threads, I scour our acreage and pick out every new bramble-vine I find. This is also a good time to yank weeds around the property, gather up unused and rotting lumber, and burn wood, weeds and thorns alike on a bonfire.

I don’t destroy everything people consider weeds; indeed, many of them I look forward to, and want to collect while we can. Dandelion leaves are great in salad, their flower-heads make wine or – dipped in batter and fried – make fritters. Nettles taste great as a vegetable, can be made into wine or dried for tea. The blue-green leaves of Fat Hen make a great addition to a salad, as do the dark green leaves of the Jack-by-the-Hedge. Finally, cowslips and oxlips make the best wine I’ve ever tasted, and will be emerging soon.

The best gardens grow in three dimensions, not just fields and beds but hedgerows and woods. We have a small copse of trees in the back of our property, and while it is no bigger than an average back garden, it has room for hazel trees that produce nuts this time of year. Some people plant blueberries and other shade-loving plants under the hazels, so they too can produce food, and under that sorrel, radishes and other ground crops– multiple levels of crops going upwards.

In preparation for planting I’ve been turning over our compost, laying newspaper and cardboard over our beds to keep the weeds out and securing it with planks of wood. Some people put newspaper or cardboard over their garden during the growing season, poking holes for the seedlings while keeping the weeds down.

Here, the Bog is only the Bog on a rainy day. The rest of the time it's forest.

We’re about to get the first buds, and that includes many edibles – hawthorn shoots are great as a salad, bramble shoots make a good tangy tea (use plenty of them), and cowslips and primroses are tasty raw and make a good wine. The first rhubarb is coming in, offering an infusion of flavours and vitamins after the long darkness of the Mother Night. Now the mornings and evenings are seeing a bit of twilight again, and it’s like exhaling after the winter – but it also means there’s no time to lose.

The changing face of college

Most of my readers know that I count John Michael Greer, author of "The Archdruid Report" and many books, as one of my main influences, and I often comment on his posts. Some time ago he wrote about the changing face of college in the Western World -- especially the USA, and I added my own thoughts. 

College, he pointed out, has evolved from being an advanced institution for elite specialists to a prerequisite for a good job, and a massive machine for keeping young Americans indebted through their best years. I commented: 

This was before my time, but when I read accounts of college in the late 19th to the late 20th century, a few things stand out:

1. Massachusetts in 1850 was estimated to have a 98% literacy rate, and you could probably find similar rates for most of what is now the USA – far higher than the USA’s literacy today.

2. At the same time, people took for granted that college was not for most people. Clarence Hall Robison’s “Agricultural Instruction in the Public Schools of the United States,” published in 1911, wrote that public schools “have a duty to the majority of its students who will not go to college.” They didn’t mean that students would miss out on college because they were poor – although there was some of that – but that most would become normal farmers, printers, builders, carpenters, and so on. Being a professor isn’t everyone’s speciality in life, and they knew that.

3. College sports involved students showing up to support their fellow students, not millions going into a money-making machine of television contracts, bidding, scholarships and sponsorships. Look at a picture of fans at a sports game circa, say, 1950, and you’ll see no screaming or painted faces, no obese people, no beer-cap cans – just rows of healthy-looking teenagers in suits and ties. It was a social, formal event, like a dance, and people dressed up for the occasion.

4. Most students took courses to specialise in their field, but then, in their final year, took a “capstone” course, taught by the dean or some venerated professor, to tie together everything they had learned. The idea was to bring the disparate strands of education together into a common cause, as they would all be members of the same society.

5. By the time I got to college in the 1990s, of course, some courses existed solely to teach grade-school-level remedial reading, and the fashion was for literature and film teachers to ignore things like plot and characters and focus instead on the lurid sexual subtext they imagined to be there. It was all very postmodern and useless.

Photo: 1943-44 Michigan Wolverines basketball team.