Hedging

You never know which life experiences are going to turn out to be useful.



Spring in Scotland! 
 Snowdrops and crocuses!

Many years ago I was inspired to make a wigwam – a rounded hut constructed of woven branches – at the far end of my backyard in Burlington, just beyond where the fire pit is now.  I worked on it for a long time, using mostly young, springy birch saplings from a friend’s land in Hinesburg, and it stood for several years. I remember showing it to a new acquaintance who admired it then asked: “Do you do a lot of environmental sculpture?” Environmental sculpture! Yes! I thought – that’s what I do!

 That wigwam is long gone now, its constituent parts rotted back into the soil they came from, but, suddenly, the modest skills I acquired in making it came back into play here at the Findhorn Foundation last week.

 I had gone with the new Park Garden focaliser Gabi to work in a particular section of the Park. She pointed out a few of the tasks before us: weeding a sunny flower bed; weeding a shady bed (it was a cold day); cutting back some vegetation, and then she said: “And there’s a willow hedge by Legacy that needs weaving.” Legacy is a new building, a wheelchair-accessible meeting space, and the land around it, disturbed by construction, is being freshly landscaped.  The nine and half metres (31 feet) of woven willow hedge on the western side of the building must be about two years old and last year’s shoots had yet to be corralled.

The finished hedge

Legacy willow hedge, unfinished -
 you can just see some of the
uncorralled shoots at the far end..



 



















Willow, you see, grows fast and furiously in this damp climate. It’s often coppiced or pollarded – that is, cut back low to the ground, or above head height – so that a crop of long, new young shoots emerge every year. These very pliable shoots are known as “withies” and they’ve been used since time immemorial for making baskets, hurdles and anything else that can be woven from them.

 Obeying the normal anti-gravity response of plant life, a coppiced or pollarded willow puts out its new shoots from the top, the cut end, but if the live withies are, rather, bent into the horizontal plane and fastened down, new shoots, also obeying the anti-gravity imperative, grown straight upwards from nodes along the length of the withy, like spikes from the rounded head of a London punk.

 

 

Me weaving the Legacy hedge

 

 Willows will grow, and vigorously, just about whatever you do to them. So if you plant them as a hedgerow, you can bend the live withies annually, weaving them in among one another, increasing the density and height of the hedge every year.

These characteristics of willows have led people to use them to create intricate environmental sculptures. Rather than weaving the withies in haphazardly, as I must admit I did with my Legacy hedge, they may be coaxed into recurring patterns, shapes and even structures. I aspire to create such structures in my own little domain, but I’m afraid that the soil in my own backyard in Burlington, Vermont, being chiefly composed of sand left behind by the receding Champlain Sea 12,000 years ago, is too dry for willow growth. 

 However haphazard my hedging might look to me, Gabi admires it, so she’s entrusted me with further willow projects. The next one is a challenge.  A short row of willow trees stands just beside the Visitor Centre. They’ve been pollarded and have sent out shoots. Could I create a bent-willow feature using the live withies in place, six foot up? If I can’t do that, I can just cut them all off.  It’s a challenge, I admit, and I’m thinking about it.

Here are the pollarded willows awaiting treatment. The Visitor Centre is the white building to the right. The little gazebo behind the trees is of national importance as the haunt of an endangered species: cigarette smokers!
Re the willows - I think I'm going to add another horizontal pole across the tops of the grey upright branches then bend the yellow withies down in a pattern and secure them to the horizontal. I'll use jute twine to tie them, not try to just weave them. I'm currently recruiting for a step-ladder-holder.
Looking at this photo, I can see that my horizontal needs to echo the waves of the woven fence below. Or could I bring the withies all the way down to the existing fence? It's a thought in progress.





Amelanchier canadensis
(photo, UConn)

 Meanwhile, I decided to earn a meal ticket by volunteering in Cluny Garden last Friday (remember Cluny, aka “Hogwart’s”?)  A small team, consisting of me, Kicky, Louise-Marie, John, Adam and David, began clearing a hedge-wide strip at the back of a well-grown perennial bed bordering a parking area. We discarded “weeds” but carefully saved dozens of perennial daisies and oriental poppies, and rescued and replanted elsewhere every single bluebell, crocus or daffodil bulb we dislodged while digging – and I can tell you there were a lot of them!

We were able to start planting a hedge of serviceberry, also known as shadbush, Amelanchier canadensis, a hedging shrub that will be a glory in all seasons.  This was the first outdoor planting of the year - Spring is really here!

So you might say I’ve been a bit hedged in this week – by such lovely hedges!

 

 

Here's an elegant willow structure with my sister Elizabeth and me in it, Chichester, England, June 2012.