Norma Forrest gazes silently across the serene landscape, crisscrossed by ancient hedgerows.
Vistas like these inspired William Shakespeare to marvel: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
This . . .
“Get off my property,” bellows potato farmer Frank Price, thrusting his crimson face to within inches of Forrest’s and waving a menacing hand over her head.
What’s the row about? Forrest has come not just to admire the scenery but to catalogue the hedgerows–those impenetrable thickets that make rural England look like so many hot cross buns. She hopes to preserve them.
She stands her ground, and Price disappears behind a nearby gate.
“He doesn’t bother me. He won’t stop me,” says the 53-year-old grandmother, fumbling for her car keys before moving on.
Shouts aren’t the only sounds that have jarred the English countryside. In the weeks and months before a law protecting old hedgerows took effect on June 1, chain saws and back hoes were working overtime, leaving long brown scars on the landscape.
Price, who removed more than 150 yards of hedgerows, was among the many landowners who took part in an uprooting frenzy. (He says his ill-fated hedges had big gaps, and 15 miles more of them remain.)
Now, thousands of volunteer “hedgerow vigilantes” such as Forrest are fanning out across the countryside. Armed with clipboards, binoculars and ordinance maps, they are conducting a twig-by-twig inventory of the remaining 200,000 miles of hedgerows.
The project is directed by the 45,000-member Council for the Protection of Rural England. Its mission is to find and record hedgerows of botanical (defined in part as those with at least seven woody species) and historical importance that are safeguarded by the law.
The council says the effort is necessary because the new law provides no funds to local authorities to assess how old and species-rich a hedgerow may be when a landowner seeks approval to grub it out.
“The English countryside is already full of vigilantes,” says Peigi Wallace, whose work spearheading surveys of 1,500 hedges with 100 volunteers in Oxfordshire served as a model for the inventory.
“They are little old ladies mostly called Mrs. Marple. Or little boys, aged 7 to 11,” she says. “It’s just harnessing people’s natural nosiness.”
The council’s boxed plastic “hedgerow action pack” directs volunteers to pace off a 30-yard length of hedge and count the number of species, referring to an illustrated plant-identification booklet.
If the species, recorded on a survey checklist, total seven or more, the hedge falls into the protected class. Such diversity offers not only a lush habitat for wildlife but also indicates the hedge is medieval, according to a leading theory that one new species takes root every 100 years or so.
The council’s instructions note that a hedge that forms a parish boundary or adjoins an archaeological site may also be eligible for protection even if it doesn’t have seven species.
England’s first hedgerows go back to the Bronze Age, when they fenced in livestock. Since World War II, though, half of England’s hedges have vanished, threatening wildlife, causing soil erosion and erasing age-old landmarks, hedgerow lovers say.
But to many farmers, hedges are a hindrance to cultivation with modern equipment and drive up food costs. Because the hedgerow vigilantes are biased, landowners say, their data could be biased–and, in time, be used to protect hedges that don’t warrant saving.
Skirmishes have been sporadic, so far. The survey is barely a month old. But even before its launch, there were showdowns.
In April, Margaret Hodge of Steeple Aston left her car running and leapt into the middle of a section of hawthorn, narrowly thwarting a crew armed with chain saws.
Some agribusiness lobbyists say hedgerow vigilantes could push many farmers–already facing heavy regulation, shrinking subsidies and an export ban on beef because of the mad-cow-disease scare–to the snapping point.
“I don’t want to sound off against the council unnecessarily, but it sets the stage for wholesale trespass,” says Paul Tame, a National Farmers Union representative. “If people start being very objectionable and laying down the law of what can and can’t be done, we will have to take the matter up accordingly.”
Some landowners insist that the council’s survey is an oversimplification of regulations and that misunderstandings are bound to arise with lots of amateurs getting involved.
For an experienced hand like Forrest, a former tree warden, it takes less than 5 minutes to survey a 30-yard length of hedge. Striding through high, wet grass along a one-lane road bordered by a hedge 5 feet high, she plucks a leafy sprig of hazel, elm, hawthorn, dog rose, maple and damson plum.
