Watching the seasons change

Dom revels in the onset of autumn and takes a closer look at managing Green Farm's hedgerows...

Despite summer’s last gasp in early October, autumn is now upon us bringing with it migrating redwings, changing colours and opportunities for habitat management. Walking onto Green Farm now feels very different to high summer. Gone are the butterflies and flowers, and the trees and shrubs are starting to look jaded and in need of a rest! But for me it’s every bit as exciting as that first warm breeze in early spring carrying the scent of bluebells and summer days to come.

Autumn means that we can get stuck into all the jobs that can only be carried out once the wildlife is in winter mode. For some species like cuckoos and swallows, that means leaving Worcestershire and migrating south to Africa. For others like brown long-eared bats and hedgehogs, it brings the urge to find a new home to sleep the winter away. And for others it signals the end of their life cycle as they can no longer survive without flowers and sun. This means that we can coppice, clear, create and plant without disturbing anything.

Hedge stretching away in the distance, with leaves just starting to change colour by Paul Lane — Green Farm hedgerow by Paul Lane

We are lucky to have lots of different hedges at Green Farm and each has its own character. Some are fairly young, in shape and made up of just a few shrub species. Others are wild, unruly and packed full of different species. But the jewel in the crown is a fabulous hedge stretching north to south right through the middle of the site. For over 600 metres it provides shelter, food and safe passage from Monkwood to the wider landscape for birds, small mammals and insects. When we were first acquainted in 2019 it was obvious from the many different tree species, how wide it was and the variety of spring flowers that grow at its base that it was special! But we didn’t realise quite how special until we started digging deeper into the history of the site.

With the wonderful knowledge of local historians (much more to come on this in future blogs), we now know that this has been a hedge for a very long time. It has seen the landscape change from woodland to arable crops to wood pasture and now meadows; it may have seen the last grey wolf of Monkwood before they disappeared here in the 1600s and it has felt the warmth of countless sunrises over the millennia. And we are talking millennia! We think from old maps that this has been a hedge for at least 1000 years. The plants themselves aren’t that old as they’ve been coppiced, laid and replanted many times. But the soil underneath has had a hedge on top of it for a long time.

Whilst this makes it very precious, we can’t just leave it alone. All hedges need rejuvenating at regular periods of their life and it’s this that enables hedges to be so long lived. When shrubs are cut, it effectively resets their lives and they regrow as youngsters. One of the best methods of resetting a hedge is to lay it. Laying hedges used to be the traditional way of stock-proofing a field as no sane cow would want to push through a dense barrier of thorns. We are starting to lay a few sections of hedge at Green Farm in this month, once the berries have been eaten by autumn wildlife. Laying on rotation over a number of years ensures that there’ll always be sections that are mature, sections that are re-growing and sections that are resting.

This is just one of the ways that we’re turning the clock back at Green Farm. By using the old style of management, we keep traditional skills alive whilst caring for some of the best habitats on site.