Autumn Hedgerow Health Checklist: 10 Signs to Look For

There is a fortnight each autumn when a hedgerow tells you almost everything about how it has been treated. The berries are on, or they are not. The birds have found it, or they have gone elsewhere. Last winter's cut has healed into a tight knuckle, or the whole thing is a flat-topped wall of twig with nothing left to fruit on. Walk the same lane in late September and again in late November and you will see the year's story written twice.

You do not need a clipboard or a botany degree. Twenty minutes, a rough idea of what you are looking at, and the habit of checking the same stretch twice will do. Here are ten things worth looking for, grouped the way you will actually notice them as you walk.

1. Fruit: the hedge's annual report

Berries are the easiest thing to judge and the most revealing. Haws on hawthorn, sloes on blackthorn, hips on dog rose, scarlet spindle capsules, elderberries, rowan, guelder rose. Look at how much there is, how evenly it is spread, and how long it lasts.

1. Fruit along the whole length, not just the sunny top. A hedge fruiting only on its south side and its upper branches has usually been cut back hard and often; the shaded lower growth never gets the chance to flower.
2. A staggered crop. Elder ripening in late August, haws through October, hips and sloes holding into the cold — that sequence feeds birds for months. A hedge where everything fruits and finishes in the same fortnight is less useful than it looks.
3. Fruit that hangs on into winter. Berries stripped by early October are feeding something. A heavy crop still untouched in December can mean the hedge stands too isolated, or that there are simply few birds left nearby to use it.

One caution while you are peering at berries: if you cannot identify a fruit with certainty, do not taste it. Sloes and haws belong to the wildlife, and several hedgerow berries are unpleasant or worse.

2. Bird activity: the loudest evidence

Stand still for ten minutes and listen. A good hedge in autumn should sound busy deep inside it — the dry tick of a dunnock, a wren's rattle of alarm, blackbirds turning over leaf litter at the base. Redwings and fieldfares arrive from the north to work hedgerows for haws and hips, often in loose flocks with blackbirds and song thrushes.

• Birds inside the hedge, not perched on the fence beside it. Plenty of twig, thorn and leaf litter gives cover and food. A hedge that only ever hosts birds on its outer edge is probably open and bare in the middle.
• Small birds at the base. Dunnocks, wrens and robins feeding in the litter beneath suggest invertebrates and seeds down there. A neatly trimmed hedge over mown grass has little to offer them.
• Silence in October. A long stretch with nothing moving in it is worth recording, and it often sits alongside the structural problems described below.

Look a little closer at the leaves

Part the foliage gently and check a few leaves for galls, leaf mines, webs and nibbled edges. None of these are problems. They are the food supply that keeps the birds coming back, and a hedge with pristine, untouched foliage in autumn has usually been sprayed.

3. Deadwood and fungi

Healthy hedges are scruffy at close range. Look for standing dead branches, a hollow where an old stem has rotted, patches of exposed wood, and the fungi that follow: jelly ear and dead man's fingers on elder, small brackets on hazel and ash. Deadwood in a hedge is habitat, not neglect — beetles, solitary bees and over-wintering invertebrates depend on it.

A hedge with no deadwood at all is usually young, or has been cut so often that nothing has had time to age.

4. Gaps, shape and the ground beneath

• Gaps that are filling in. A break in the line with suckers, seedlings and bramble pushing up is recovering. A break with nothing but grass, a fence and bare soil is a hedge quietly disappearing.
• An A-shaped profile. The ideal cross-section is wider at the base than the top, so light reaches the bottom. A hedge cut flat up the sides and squared on top will be hollow and bare at its base within a few years, with all the growth pushed upwards.
• The strip at the foot of the hedge. Some nettles, cow parsley and rough grass are normal and useful. A thick, dark rank of nettles and cleavers along the whole length suggests nutrient run-off from fields or roads, which favours coarse weeds over the finer plants a hedge needs.

Ivy deserves a word, because it is often blamed unfairly. Mature ivy gives cover and late nectar, and a hedge with some ivy in it is not a failing hedge. A hedge that is nothing but ivy, with the hawthorn beneath shaded out and fruiting poorly, is a different matter.

5. The signs of poor management

Most of what goes wrong with hedges comes down to two habits: cutting them every year, and cutting them in the wrong season.

• A hard, blunted line along the top. Repeated flailing to exactly the same height leaves a crust of thickened twig with little new growth beneath it. You can often see the old cut line as a horizontal scar.
• Cutting in autumn, before the berries are used. A hedge trimmed in September loses its hips and haws just as the winter thrushes arrive.
• Uniform, single-species stretches. Long runs of hawthorn, all the same height, with no field maple, hazel, dogwood or spindle mixed in, support far less wildlife.
• No flowering wood on the lower half. If the bottom metre has not flowered or fruited in years, light is not getting there.

6. What to do with what you find

Note the date and something you can find again — a grid reference, a what3words mark or a description of the spot. Then walk the same stretch next autumn and compare. One year tells you about the weather; three years tell you about the hedge.

If the hedge is not yours, a polite word with the landowner, the parish council or your local wildlife trust is a sensible first step, and many areas have hedgerow survey groups that welcome records. If it is your hedge, most of these problems are fixed by doing less, at a better time.

• Cut in late winter — late January to early February suits most hedges — after the berries have been used.
• Do not cut every year. A two- or three-year rotation gives the hedge time to flower and fruit.
• Leave a third of the hedge uncut each year, or cut one side only, then swap.
• Where a hedge is leggy and hollow, laying or coppicing a stretch in sections over several winters will restore it far better than another pass with the flail.

If you are thinking about removing a hedgerow or doing major work on one, check with your local authority first: hedgerow regulations can apply, and some hedges sit within protected sites.

None of this has to be done in a single autumn. Go back to the same stretch in February with a hot drink and see what the winter did to it. A hedge that fruits along its whole length, rustles with small birds and has a bit of rot in it is a hedge being left alone enough to work.

Photo: PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay