Our partners, the Sid Valley Biodiversity Group, are hosting the festival’s Biodiversity Day on Saturday 18 October with a focus on hedgerows. Ed Dolphin from the biodiversity group, wrote an article for the Sidmouth Herald on the subject.
One of the delights of living in Devon is seeing the landscape as a patchwork of small fields framed by miles and miles of hedgerows. In a recent survey, Sidmouth Arboretum worked out that the Sid Valley has over 300 miles of hedges, much of it around the 4,000 fields.
Apart from the visual appeal compared to the vast flat prairies of East Anglia, the hedges are diverse habitats and home to a wide variety of nature, fungi and lichens, wild flowers and creatures such as butterflies, birds and small mammals.
The hedges themselves are as diverse as the flora and fauna that live within and beside them. In different areas of the valley, there are blackthorn hedges, hawthorn hedges, elm hedges, beech hedges and even holly hedges, but most are mixed with the addition of some elder, oak and ash added in.
Then there are the thousands of trees that stand in the hedges. Some are small trees, such as hawthorn, that have grown out of a neglected hedge, but many are standard trees, such as oak, that have been nurtured for centuries as a timber crop.
Hedges are a human invention, intended to mark out land ownership and keep livestock from wandering, and they have been around for thousands of years.
Much of our nature has adapted to and is dependent on the hedges. If humans remove the hedges, or do not look after them so they degrade into lines of trees, much of the nature is lost. In the Arboretum’s survey, just under half of the hedges were being maintained in a way that made them nature-rich. Some had been reduced to nothing more than a line of stumps. Some, such as those along the eastern side of the golf course, which have not been maintained for more than fifty years, are now a line of mature trees with little growing on the bare banks between them.
Traditionally, hedges were maintained by being laid every few years. Individual woody stems were cut halfway through, and the uprights were laid down. They were still alive, and new dense growth would emerge. This is labour-intensive, and now most hedges, if they are maintained, are cut regularly with a tractor-mounted flail. These hedges are not able to support as much nature as traditional ones. There are opportunities to find out more about these important and interesting parts of our valley during the Science Festival.
Saturday 18th sees the Sid Valley Biodiversity Group having a hedgerow day at the Stowford Community Centre, just across the road from Waitrose. All day, there will be a group of volunteers working on a hedge planted by the Arboretum some years ago.They will show you how to lay a hedge, a skill you could take back to your own garden.
There will be a walk exploring the ancient hedgerow along the pedestrian section of Core Hill Road and a talk about the work of the Donkey Sanctuary, where they are managing their hedges for nature.
In the afternoon, there will be a talk about those delightful denizens of hedgerows, the hedgehog.
There will be art and craft activities for families and representatives from many local groups who can tell you about their work.