Healthy Hedgerows Part 2： benefits for us and nature

Hi I'm Megan Gimber from People's Trust for Endangered Species and we're back here at Hedgelife Farm in late spring to talk about how amazing healthy hedgerows are and how we can manage our hedgerows to give us so many different benefits. Hedgerows have the capacity to be absolutely incredible for wildlife and to recap on the film we filmed in winter about hedgerow management, the top tips for managing a hedge is to understand that they are a living habitat. They move through different phases of their life and their management needs to change to reflect that. So at some point we will need to do something like rejuvenation, we need to lay them or copse them once a generation and then we need to be sensitive with the trimming as well, either trimming on a rotation or trimming incrementally higher and wider each time and that way we can get the maximum benefits from these hedges. We've seen an enormous decline in our biodiversity and this includes things like pollinators and insects and hedgerows can be an absolute lifeline for this wildlife. There was one fantastic study done on hedges that showed that one hedge had the capacity to support over 2,000 different species, most of them being insects and the reason hedges are so good for wildlife is that they provide so many different things for our native ecology. This hedgerow right here will be providing a physical home for a huge amount of wildlife, right from insects building their nests all the way to birds with their chicks this time of year building their nest in the protective scrub of this of this hedge, but of course it's not just a home, it provides a lot of food as well, food for insects, for pollinators, for predators, for birds, as well as this habitat being vital connectivity. So food, shelter, home and connectivity are four of the most fundamental things that hedges provide for our native wildlife and for pollinators this benefit starts right in the early spring, especially when you've got a nice mixed species hedge. Each of the different woody species in your hedge will flower at a slightly different time of the year and it might kick off with blackthorn that normally flowers in early spring and that provides vital pollinary source for things like our bumblebees, kick-starting their colonies for the year and then it might move on to things like the cherry plum and the hawthorn and the crab apples and the more species, the more woody species we've got in our hedgerow, the longer we've got, we call it a floral sequence, the longer that hedge will be providing blossom for pollinators and hedges are also fantastic for our native mammal species, things like dormice. At this time of year we'll be thinking about building nests and hedges, believe it or not, are a fantastic habitat for dormice. We might think of them normally as woodland species but if you've got a hedge that's big enough and diverse enough and well managed it's perfectly good for dormice to be in and breeding in and it might seem odd that hedgerows are this good for wildlife considering the fact that inherently they are a man-made habitat but actually the structure of a hedge with all of its different elements actually reflects what we used to have pre-agriculture. So the fact that we've got this wonderful scrubby shrubby layer, we've got the margin of tussocky grass and wild flowers and we've got open canopied hedgerow trees, that's really similar to what we believe what most of this country would have looked like before agriculture and actually considering most of our ecology adapted to that wonderful pre-agricultural wildwood of scrub and grazed pasture and open grown trees it makes a lot of sense that hedgerows which have this deep connection to that structure are this good at wildlife too. And of course the shelter that a hedge provides can also be really useful to crops, it can prevent crop lodging, it can prevent things like chilling injuries on vegetable farming or premature blossom shedding if you're fruit fruit farming or have orchards and of course it also helps protect our soil. It protects our soil from wind-borne erosion by reducing the wind speeds and also water-borne erosion because it helps slow the flow of water when we get floods and deluges. On top of all of these other benefits we're now looking at hedges to help with some of our wider societal issues, helping clean water, clean air and sequestering carbon in our fight against climate change. Now we're in the early days of understanding how much carbon hedges have the potential to sequester and store but the early indications are that these are fantastic in our fight against climate change. Recent research shows that hedges can actually store more carbon per hectare than forest which I find absolutely fantastic and they do this in many ways. They're storing carbon in this shrubby layer here, in their hedgerow trees like this whopping grey oak behind me, in their coarse woody roots, in their fine roots and also in the soil. So what we can do to help hedges store this carbon? We've got many options. Number one, we can be letting our hedges get bigger on average as part of their life cycle so that they're storing more in this we call above ground woody biomass, this scrubby structure up here. We can be establishing more hedgerow trees because of course a hedgerow tree will be there throughout the life cycles of the hedge as a permanent storage of that of that hedgerow carbon. We can be gapping hedges up anywhere that there's a physical gap in a hedgerow we can plug that up the next time we rejuvenate that to get more and of course on top of all of that we can also be planting more hedgerows where we have the space and the capacity. And as I stand here watching the butterflies flutter past, listening to the birds sing from the hedgerow trees and watching the bees buzz around this hedgerow, it just reminds me that hedgerows are also for everybody. They have a deep connection to our countryside and they are just part of what makes this countryside what it is. The next time you climb a hill I urge you to look out at the countryside around you and just try and picture what it would look like without hedgerows and I think just doing that will show you how deep-rooted a part of our culture they are. Spectacular, wonderful to sit and watch and just marvel at just how many benefits they can bring us.