The Dead Hedge - an old idea gets a new lease of life.

The autumn and winter storms have bequeathed us fallen stems, branches and even whole trees in the garden and, apart from the trees, a dead hedge will reliably deal with all this material. As well as solving these problems for us, a dead hedge makes the perfect spot for many of our garden residents, some of whom are too small for us to see.

In my writing and workshops over the last 30 years, I’ve been promoting the benefits of dead hedges so I’m delighted they’ve become part of the gardening mainstream. So, while showing that there’s a design for any garden, I’ll also don my historian’s hat and explore the ways folk have used them over recent centuries. I’ve got Scottish examples here and am sure they’ll be replicated elsewhere.

Dead hedges have always made an easily constructed and free barrier. Now we also value them as an ideal base for many forms of wildlife; and they both store carbon and enrich the soil as woody material rots down.

For as long as folk have cultivated land in and near forests, they’ve had woody material readily to hand. Much of the small stuff was used for firewood but some twigs and branches had other uses. At an agricultural level, coppice poles and brash made fencing material often used to protect plantings against grazing herbivores or to limit stock to a specified grazing area. During the 15th and 16th Centuries, monks at Couper Angus monastery in Scotland did exactly this by requiring householders to act as foresters and protect saplings with dead hedges.

In the same way, another Scot, Andrew Gilchrist of Stonehaven describes how a dead hedge was used to protect young saplings from grazing animals: “in many instances, both at the time of planting and at each periodical cutting, the fencing might be done at small cost, by arranging the prunings of trees or thorn hedges in a form of a dead hedge. In the year 1859, we cleared a crop of natural coppice from the banks of the Nethen and one of its tributaries in the county of Lanark.”

There are, of course, many illustrations of this use of dead hedges as enclosures that would be what was described in 1715 as “sufficient and sensible against beasts”.

Sadly, during the more recent agricultural ‘improvements’, these wildlife- friendly boundaries came to be replaced by living hedges and increasingly by post and wire ones. Of course this process now makes dead hedges all the more precious for life in our gardens.

So in many ways, our gardens are becoming increasingly valuable for wildlife. Tiny organisms only visible through a microscope are there aplenty, helping to create suitable conditions for the insects, toads, beetles and small birds we enjoy seeing. One summer, a year or two ago, I remember watching a wee wren regularly bustling in and out of the shelter. And on another occasion I’ve seen a hedgehog nipping out of one. On this occasion, the hedge was in a demonstration dead hedge which formed part of a composting area my firm was running for a local council. [It was much neater than my own one illustrated here}] Wherever the dead hedge, let all the decaying stems provide a wildlife theatre for you!

The beauty of a dead hedge is that you can design it to suit your garden. The size is largely immaterial and it can be designed to either fit neatly into an attractive part of the garden or discretely concealed elsewhere.

As you can see here, my dead hedge is large and functional, lacking any trim neatness. I have a large area providing a mass of material for processing, so everything gets dumped on to an ever-expanding pile. But worry not. It does rot down very slowly and performs all the functions of a neat little pile.

I saw a dinky little site for a hedge during a workshop I was running a few years ago. My host showed us a gap between his garage and a hawthorn hedge and wondered if it would do. The dead hedge would be the length of the garage with a 45cm width and would work well. In other words, make the structure as long or short as you like.

My friend’s hedge and wall was as good as the standard structure. It entails sinking 2 lines of parallel posts, each 45cm apart, with a width of no less than 60cm. The recommended width is sometimes given as 45cm but I reckon that’s a bit on the small side to be very useful. The regular rectangular structure isn’t necessary. You could run a line of posts at a corner of the garden, thereby creating a triangular ‘hedge’ or any other shape you fancy. The living occupants aren’t choosy, provided the likes of hedgehogs can get in and out easily.

You can partly conceal the contents of the hedge by weaving pliable lines of stems like clematis or honeysuckle between the posts. Coloured willow or cornus wands would make an attractive feature.

I use my very functional dead hedge for any woody stuff I can’t use elsewhere and pile it up without cutting it up. But you’ll need to use loppers or secateurs to make the contents a bit straighter and more regular for a smaller unit.

The dead hedge makes the perfect repository for thorny rose and gooseberry stems and the likes of the prickly Sichuan pepper (Zanthoxylum simulans) I was tidying up the other day.

As farmers and gardeners have found over the centuries, a dead hedge is invaluable and has a wide range of uses.