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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: hedgerows

Pick of the month: Crabapples

22 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by sallynex in kitchen garden, pick of the month

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

crabapple jelly, crabapples, Golden Hornet, hedgerows, John Downie, Red Sentinel, small trees, trees

img_4119

Crabapple ‘John Downie’ (I think)

There are some garden plants which can’t make up their mind where they belong. Kitchen garden? Or flower borders?

The answer, almost always, is both. I’m a big fan of including ornamental-but-edible plants in the bit of the garden that isn’t explicitly for growing food: things like the fuchsias I harvest for their berries, or the lavenders and scented-leaf pelargoniums which on the rare occasions I have time and opportunity to channel my inner domestic goddess I use for flavouring cookie dough.

Crabapples fall firmly into this territory. They are pretty little garden trees, with lovely spring blossom and pretty good autumn colour too. They behave themselves impeccably, never outgrowing their space and needing little pruning: the worst you can say of them is that they have a bit of a meh outline that can look downright scruffy if you like your gardens architecturally pleasing. But in a wild garden like mine, that’s fine.

img_4120

My best crabapple harvest ever

We inherited a crab with the garden but it has never, until this year, fruited. I’m not sure what’s brought on its current outburst of generosity: perhaps it’s because I pruned the top out last year to give it a slightly better shape and pulled off the curtain of Clematis montana that had – as it does most years – leapt across from the fence over which it grows rampantly alongside to climb up and over the crabapple as well. The montana is a lovely plant, and I forgive it everything each May when it smothers said fence (about 20ft long) with a confection of flowers so dense you can’t see the foliage underneath. But it’s sometimes hard to keep its ambitions for world domination in check.

img_4121

Crabapple windfalls

Or maybe it’s just because it’s been a good year for apples: the Devonshire Quarrenden in the veg garden has been prolific this season, too. But anyway: for the first time the ground beneath was carpeted with little miniature apples. Pound after pound of them. They’re gorgeous.

I’m pretty sure our crab is a ‘John Downie’, the variety most often recommended if you want the best fruit: and I can vouch for its prolific harvest of large (2-3″) fruits. They are flushed red, but cook to a honey yellow.

For brilliant red crabapple jelly, you might try ‘Red Sentinel’, particularly lovely as the (smaller) fruits glow so bewitchingly against the foliage in autumn. ‘Golden Hornet’ I’m not so fond of: there was one in the gardens at Bicton College when I was studying there and its fruits turn an unappetising brown when overripe, still on the tree. It doesn’t, as they say in the trade, die well.

These are the three I have personal experience of: I’m told ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘Dolgo’ are better choices if you like your crabapple Jelly scarlet as the red fruits are somewhat larger than ‘Red Sentinel’. Crabs are naturally high in pectin and mix well with other fruits, so if you’re making jelly or jam, add a few crabapples to help it set: hedgerow jelly, made of crabapples and blackberries, is sublime. And as if that weren’t enough on the usefulness scale: crabapples will also pollinate domestic apples, so if you don’t have room for two full-sized apple trees, try one apple tree and one crabapple instead. They can even be espalier-trained if you only have a fence to spare. Versatile or what.

 

We are all scientists

26 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in education, wildlife gardening

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

citizen science, hedgerows, natural history museum, OPAL, wildlife

OVER-18s-GENERAL-WILDLIFE_Paul-Steven_dormouse-on-forsythia-taken-in-St-Ives-Cornwall

‘Dormouse on Forsythia’ by Paul Steven, St. Ives, Cornwall: winner, over 18s ‘General Wildlife’ category, OPAL Devon & Cornwall wildlife photography competition

Recently I found myself sitting cross-legged staring into my hedge.

I have particularly fine hedges. Good thing too as there are rather a lot of them: half a mile, to be exact.

They are ancient Somerset hedgerows and were old before I was even born. As is the way in these parts they’re built up on banks of churt flint and are mainly hazel: some are laid, but most are not, relying on the density of the species which grow in them to keep animals in and people out.

They are wildlife superhighways (as I know to my cost, having lost more just-sown broad bean seeds to the field mice in my hedgerows than I care to remember). You can tell how healthy your hedge is by counting the number of different species of plant in a three metre stretch, plus noting down evidence of animal activity (holes) and food (berries, nuts) as well as actual animals themselves (in my case, mainly snails, woodlice and centipedes).

My hedges got a silver award for structure (they’re getting a bit gappy here and there) and a gold for animal diversity and wildlife value. I felt quite proud.

In case you’re wondering what I’m on about, I was doing a biodiversity survey for OPAL (Open Air Laboratories), the citizen science project run by Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum, the Met Office, half a dozen other universities, and oh, loads of august institutions.

Its surveys have collected over 55,000 records of evidence collected by ordinary people like you and me, involving us in investigating the effects of everything from soil activity (worm-hunting) to water quality (ponds) and air quality (lichen – that was another one which had me peering at bits of my garden, this time the apple trees). There are now nearly 10 separate surveys, and anyone can join in: take a look and choose one you’d like to have a go at here.

They’re great fun, they get you looking at your garden in a whole different light, and what’s more you’re contributing to some really important research, feeding in to the great sea of knowledge from which ground-breaking insights occasionally pop up to influence governments, formulate solutions and generally change the way we think.

Citizen science is a fantastic way for scientists to gather huge quantities of information. The RSPB now has decades of detail about garden birds thanks to the Big Garden Birdwatch in January; the Big Butterfly Count in mid-summer is doing the same thing for butterflies; and the Ladybird Survey is keeping tabs on invasive alien harlequins via records of insects visiting people’s houses, sheds and gardens.

Isn’t it interesting that so many are garden-based? I’m sure it’s partly because that’s the outside space most of us have access to; but I suspect it’s also because gardeners are closet scientists by nature.

I don’t think of myself as much of a scientist; far too woolly of thought. But when it comes to plants and gardening I’ve taken science on board almost without realising it. I test my soil and know all about pH and geology; I can tell you the difference between xylem and phloem and wax lyrical on the ultra-violet patterns on foxglove flowers.

And I think that’s why I like doing OPAL surveys. I’ve become a scientist without noticing. Surprisingly, in the light of my almost overwhelmingly negative memories of science from school, it’s really interesting, too. Citizen science is taking off the lab coats, stripping out the inexplicable jargon and taking down the barriers dividing us into ‘artists’ or ‘scientists’. Turns out you don’t have to choose: it’s just about finding out about the world around you, after all. And it gives you a really good excuse to look at your garden for absolutely ages.

Hedging my bets #2

25 Tuesday Jan 2011

Posted by sallynex in pruning

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

hedgerows, hedges, mixed hedges, rejuvenating, wildlife hedges

So having established that I have the wildlife habitat equivalent of the Mona Lisa around my garden and if I so much as touch it I shall have the wrath of a thousand hairy-bearded environmentalists raging about my head, I have had to work out how it is possible to garden alongside my hedge.

Just after a puny hedgetrimmer had been at it: not a shred of difference did it make (the tops were done with a flail: now that’s more like it, but a little impractical inside the garden as the tractor wouldn’t fit)

I have been weighing up a few options:

1. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with a wall.
Social suicide. I could never lift my head in polite society, and certainly not in the village, ever again. People have been sent to the Tower for less.

2. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with another hedge.
There is a precedent for this in the village: someone down the road from us has clearly ripped out their hedgerow and replaced it with a sort of cotoneaster sort of thing. It looks horrible: the essence of suburbia dropped like an alien into a rural idyll.

I have a lovely memory of the beautiful beech hedge I planted around my old house: but again, such clipped refinement would sit oddly among the wildness, and besides, it took years to establish, during which time the cows who live next door would have a high old time skipping around among my cabbages.

The inside of my hedge. Now in the process of returning to its former occupation as the outside of my hedge.

3. Make it a bit smaller.
Ah: now you’re talking more sense. The main point of conflict between me and my hedge is that it’s taking up too much of the garden. This is especially the case in my very thin vegetable garden: when you’ve only got about 20ft to play with anyway, an 8ft hedge either side reduces the available growing space to a wide path.

When you look more closely at the actual structure of the hedge, it’s quite obvious that it’s escaped from its original boundaries. The hump of chalk bank which my hedges stand on is hidden behind a forest of suckers: mainly hazel, but an awful lot of bramble and some blackthorn, too. There’s a good few years’ growth there in fact, and I got to thinking if this were a shrub, I’d be pitying it for being so neglected and working out how to renovate it back to its original shape.

In fact if you start thinking like that, you remember (something I bang on about quite a lot) that hedges are still plants. They need feeding, watering and weeding just like your other garden plants: and in this case, they also require rejuvenating.

So that’s what I’ve been doing: it is a herculean task, involving a lot of heavy action with the loppers and pruning saw, and a pile of green waste which has just passed my head height across about two car’s lengths of garden.

But I am uncovering a better hedge: a well-behaved hedge, one which is a bit gappy at the moment (despite still being about 4ft across) but looks as if it will this season have enough light and room to regenerate with new wood and fresh growth.

Looking back down the garden at the bit I just did: the darker area marks the original footprint of the hedge. As you can see, it is transforming the space: and, though it looks a bit rough at the moment, I hope it will transform the health of the hedge as well.

I get four feet of extra space each side of the garden, and my grassy path of a veg plot is transformed into something that looks like you might be able to grow something in it.

I don’t think my Grade I listed hedges will ever be low-maintenance; but all the best things take care and love and attention to keep them at their best. And besides, I like to garden my hedges. The nice thing is that now I can garden in between them, too.

Hedging my bets #1

20 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

hedgerows, hedges, mixed hedges, surveys, wildlife hedges

I am feeling the heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders.

You see, I have a proper hedgerow to look after. Actually, that’s about the understatement of the year: I have about half a mile of hedgerow, as it forms the entire border of my very long and very thin garden.

Hedgerow is a proper recognised wildlife habitat: it’s a priority habitat, in fact, protected under the Biodiversity Action Plan which describes them as ‘particularly important for biodiversity conservation’. About 130 vulnerable species (so rabbits don’t count) depend on them for their survival, including moths, birds, lichens and fungi.

Around here, there are miles and miles and miles of hedgerows. They are a wonderful, atmospheric feature of the landscape, turning lanes into green tunnels and patchworking the fields. They are, let’s remember, essentially man-made: the farmers around here have formed them over centuries, with traditional management techniques which are still, essentially, unchanged (although these days they use tractors and flails, not billhooks). If farmers didn’t manage hedgerows, they would disappear.

The OPAL project (it stands for Open Air Laboratories) is currently running a biodiversity survey which uses hedges to measure health of your local ecosystem. So I thought I’d put my own hedge to the test: you take a three-metre stretch of hedge and analyse the state of the hedge, its plant species, evidence of mammals living there, and any other creatures you find (mostly invertebrates like woodlice and snails).

I must admit mine was quite a cursory inspection: you’re supposed to do these things in groups, and record it on a proper form, which I’d forgotten to print out. But in my randomly-chosen three-metre stretch here’s what I found:


Plantlife:
Hart’s-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium)
Herb robert (Geranium robertianum)
Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota)
Brambles (Rubus fruticosus)


Ivy (Hedera helix)
Creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens)
Nettles (Urtica dioica)

and I also happen to know (because they’re now starting to come up) there are also;
Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis)
Cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum)

Other things:
Lichens, most of which I can’t identify
Mosses, ditto
Little yellow fungi, ditto
Bracket fungi on the rotten bits

Woody plants:
Elder (of which the above is the oldest example I’ve yet found in the hedge)(Sambucus nigra)
Hazel (lots) (Corylus avellana)
Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa)
Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)
Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

It’s also a sign of the health of my hedgerows that there is a good mix of dead wood and live: the live provides the fruits, berries etc while the dead wood is colonised by tunnelling insects and the like.

However the hazel is undeniably taking over: there is less blackthorn than I would like (though my poor prickled fingers don’t agree) and I could do with some more elder too.

Creatures:
I didn’t find much to look at since it was winter and very cold when I looked at my hedgerow, and most sensible things were tucked up warm and weren’t remotely interested in being surveyed.

However I did find this rather fine evidence of rabbits (as if I needed any proof: they scatter to right and left as you walk down the garden here). I have also, since I’ve been here, seen voles, mice, fox footprints and hundreds and hundreds of birds: wrens, sparrows, bluetits, wagtails, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, and that’s not counting the ones I couldn’t identify. And buzzards, and crows, and seagulls. though I don’t think they rely too heavily on the hedgerows for day-to-day sustenance.

You see? What a responsibility. But though I like wildlife as much as the next person, and have a sense of tradition and history, and a great love of the countryside: I must also garden. And my hedges are undeniably taking over my garden, to the point where there is little garden left. They are 8ft wide in places, for goodness’ sake.

My next step? What would you do?

The Friday photo

26 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Friday photo, hedgerows, snow

It has been snowing. In November.


Not much, especially if you’re reading this in Scotland or Northumbria – but enough to make footprints in the road and spangle the cobwebs in the hedgerows with suspended spray.

This is continuing for the next ten days, so they say: and it’s the first time since 1993 it’s snowed this early. At this rate we will lose all concept of what a ‘normal’ winter might be: can you remember the last one?

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