Hedgerows Remembered

Laurie Lee’s Cidar with Rosie chronicles the traditional village life which disappeared with the advent of new developments, such as the coming of the motor car and relates the experiences of childhood seen from many years later. His prose on ancient meadows brings me to tears. Sadly, the flower-rich grasslands have almost entirely disappeared. Some parishes have allowed rewilding to prosper but it is reported that 97% or 7.5 million acres have been lost since the 1930s as our population has boomed. Moorcroft’s designers have for many decades celebrated, not only the wonderful wildflowers that can be found in meadows, but also the variety of wildlife, including important plant pollinators, that these special places are home to. On National Meadows Day last week, we curated together a number of meadow-inspired designs for you to enjoy. Today, I wish to look back on what was probably our finest wildflower design, and the current front runner, Churnet Hedgerow. Both emanate not from a wildflower meadow but from our common hedgerows.

View National Meadows Day Designs

Before the popularity of hedge trimming in rural areas, hedges often grew, according to my Grandfather, Ronald Edwards, with ‘wild abandonment’ allowing a vast array of wildlife to flourish. From the 1940s farmers concentrated on growing more food and crops. They often grubbed out the hedgerows and replaced them with wire and post fences. This made fields larger and allowed for greater mechanisation and an increased space for crops, but insect and wildflowers life suffered as hedges, a huge net for blown seeds, enabling an abundance of wildflowers to grow out of the thicket. Indeed, hedgerows were composed of solid mounds of earth resembling parapets that surrounded individual plots and were between three and twelve feet high and a colossal one to four feet thick prior to World War II. I remember my Grandfather showing me the old shadows of the myriad of hedgerows that once flanked a rather large field he called Black Ryden. These were the hedges that my father lolloped around during his childhood, where he would observe hundreds of types of insects, including butterflies, moths and bees, which are said to use hedgerows to navigate the landscape. Later this observational skill would prove useful in examining Moorcroft designs.

From birds nesting inside hedges and dormice bringing up the next generation, to toads, lizards, snakes, bats and hedgehogs using it as a safe corridor between habitats and being a safe heaven. So, what of the best Moorcroft Hedgerow design of all time – on sheer scale, the prize would have to go to Rydan Lane by our Senior designer, Rachel Bishop, who sought to bring to life the hedgerow of the Moorcroft Chairman’s childhood home. This floor standing vase created in 1999, held a majestic wildflower fantasia which saw cow parsley soar to the rim of the vase tinged with the pinks of summer, where bright yellow buttercups and fanning ferns towered over blackberry thickets and clover. This limited edition (100) was the hedgerow of late summer.  And yet there was something missing from those care-free summer days – the heady aroma that enchanted Shakespeare in his prose and weaves its deep cadmium colours into the hedgerows to hide nesting birds and insect life from their predators. Honeysuckle.

View Churnet Hedgerow

Step forward the Hedgerow of dreams which weaves its lazy way through the Pennines’ hills and valleys, the Churnet Valley. This is a place that Vicky often visits to enjoy the scenery, and as often happens, the more familiar she became with the landscape, the more she paid attention to the hedgerow flowers to be found in abundance along the picturesque route. Wild honeysuckle and roses scramble in the background. While boldly shooting up towards the sun are foxgloves in shades of pale and deep pink, their central trumpets dotted with myriad free hand painted dots, taking the limelight. And who could not have a hedgerow of triumph without the blasts of colour from the foxglove?  Nearer the base, small golden buttercups brighten the hedgerow, while higher up tiny wine bilberries ripen in the summer sunshine for all to enjoy. There is so much jammed packed into this design that it is like a perfect bale of hay – and so I close this journey down memory lane as I started, with the words of Laurie Lee “We carried cut hay from the heart of the rick, packed tight as tobacco flake, with grass and wildflowers juicily fossilized within – a whole summer embalmed in our arms.”