Hedgerows as Deep Time and Metaphor

 

Map of the oldest companies in the world. A full map of the whole world can be seen here  This work provided through a Creative Commons license.

  I am an admirer of old things. Old technologies, old traditions, old places, and things that reside in deep time. For something to be old, it has to transcend the boundary of a few centuries and have its origins in a time so ancient that the lines between fact and myth blur in the recesses of the deepest chronology.

Japan is a bucket list destination for me partly because it scores high for the number of things and traditions that can be traced back a thousand years or more. They have retained things that many other cultures have cast aside. But, even Japan with its culture of venerating tradition is losing many of these treasures. The oldest continuously operating business owned by the same family since 578 will continue running but as part of a corporate subsidiary instead of a family business. This sad fact is a telling symbol of our time where corporate cancers ravage the planet by wiping away all that is traditional in the name of creating shareholder value.

Hedgerows, rare in the United States, but common in parts of Europe, especially the United Kingdom, are just such a deep-time tradition that interests me. Hedgerows in the UK date back thousands of years and the oldest still in existence is almost a thousand years old. The tradition made sense in a place with ample rain as a way of building durable, long-lasting boundary lines and fences that continually renew themselves if properly cared for. They, like everything else traditional, are dying out, just in the relatively short interval since the Second World War. Below is a wartime video of hedge-laying that documents the process of making hedgerows. 

 To me, the hedgerow represents an appreciation of deep time, culture and place that transcends time. It is the way many people and cultures used to look at time and something we should return to. Some of course still look at things this way, namely indigenous people, but their voice is drowned by the flashy billboards of consumer culture. 

The hedgerow is a metaphor for how we should behave toward our earthly home. The person who plants a hedgerow will not reap the full benefit, but their action will echo down the decades and centuries to future generations who will. Like many of the traditions cast aside in our age of hyper-ephemeral everything, it represents a long-term commitment to a place and a future tied to the past that is lost in our worship of the present as all that matters. The dying art of making a hedgerow is like all manual skills that reshape something with an eye toward generations not yet born: an act that helps form a deep relationship and an appreciation for a small piece of earth. In addition, the hedgerow provides added benefits like habitat for local wildlife and erosion control. In a modern twist, they are an underappreciated carbon sink, sequestering carbon in the soil below and through the sheer bulk of woody mass.

Hedgerow photo courtesy Tom Hynes via Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons

 I have built many fences in my life from those made with steel posts and wire to heavy tamarack poles. None of these likely remain as originally constructed only a few decades ago. One summer, I helped install a heavy white plastic fence for a horse pasture. It was an ersatz version mimicking the white-painted fences often associated with horse pastures. We weren't even finished installing it before a giant draft horse thrust his body over the fence, bending and straining one of the polyvinyl chloride boards until it popped out of the post. Even as we were building it, the process of entropy was setting in. It would be interesting to see if that fence still stands almost three decades later. Probably, like all plastic outdoors, the forces of nature eventually weakened and degraded it until it began to crack and flake off into microplastics. Plastic, the useful symbol of our short-term cultural thinking, is like so many products of our “life in the now” civilization, something that provides short-term benefits in the present but leaves a long tail of toxic, wasteful legacy for future generations.

I wish that at the time I had the opportunity to build a hedgerow instead those many decades ago. If I had, it would just be entering maturity and I could enjoy the fruits of something I created in the recent past that will still be there generations into the future. All those years ago, the new hedgerow would have looked like a jumble or a brush pile when completed. The only satisfaction was the knowledge that it would grow into something beautiful in the future.

Instead, the "modern" plastic fence we constructed gave the owner and those of us erecting the fence the immediate benefit of seeing a completed fence. The trade off is that successive generations will be billed with costly repairs that will be handed off to each new generation as the earth is mined for more metal, wood, paint and other products of the industrial economy. 

The late farmer, essayist and Darthmouth professor Noel Perrin in the first of his entertaining books of essays on rural life quoted Robert Frost in First Person Rural: Essays of A Sometime Farmer.  In a meditation on fenceposts he wrote:

"Three foggy mornings and a rainy day

Will rot the best birch fence a man can build"

Unlike the hedgerow, the manufactured fence mines and pollutes the earth during its manufacture and life span. The destructive iteration of the fence dates from a time when wooden fences were built from chopped-down forests to make fences that would rot instead of grow. The historic tamarack fences I once helped build were wasteful of timber, built of that wood because of its rot resistance. The industrial form of fence dates from the late 19th-century invention of barbed wire and has an added dimension in that it requires the mining of the earth for metals and plastics made from fossil fuels. A fence that gives back was replaced with one that takes and consumes and pollutes, an apt metaphor for our time.

In North Dakota where I live, the trend is toward ripping out our local version of hedgerow called shelterbelts to make room for bigger machines. It is a short sighted form of thinking that sacrifices the future to the economic needs of the present. Instead of efforts to create shelterbelts as carbon sinks we have Rube Goldbergian schemes to pipe in carbon and pump it underground. How much irony is there in a pipeline shipping oil out of the state running side by side with one shipping the burned byproduct back into the state? I digress. That is a story for another time that is linked to modern fences, since both are driven by what Paul Kingsnorth writes is the “philosophy of the machine”.

 In short, the philosophy of the hedgerow is to take from the present, informed by the past to give to the future, while that of the modern fence is to give to the present by taking from the future as if there were no past. To maintain an old hedgerow is to connect to past generations while giving something to the future in a interconnected line that is cyclical by nature; each advising the other in a neverending cycle.

 Our whole globalized consumer civilization is in the late stages of tearing out the hedgerows of deep culture and time and replacing them with a plastic fence that is falling apart even as it is being built leaving a pile of toxic trash for the future. Hedgerows aren't the answer to every problem, but the philosophy engendered in engaging with something older than us that connects to the past and future in a neverending line can be.