25 October

A wonder from the English countryside. The hedgerow. We use fences now, but the hedgerow is way more than just a natural fence. I think it shows an entirely different relationship between people and the landscape. A hedgerow is a symbiotic relationship between people, animals and plants, it creates a border for a field but also habitat and a highway for animals. On our fenced farms, there are no ‘corridors’ of plants to help animals move across the landscape. The English countryside, and its villages, was and often still is like this. A symbiotic relationship between people, the land and other living things. In countries like Australia, we talk about ‘the land’ or ‘bush’ as something over-there, separate to towns and cities. The reason the English countryside is so stunning is that it doesn’t divide towns from landscape. (Alas cars are destroying it too, now, and thousands of kms of hedgerows have been ripped up.)