Hooper's rule says you can tell how old a hedgerow is by counting the amount of woody plants in a length of hedge. In 1965, he was investigating the impact of intensive agriculture on the landscape. He postulated the following formula¹:

Age of Hedge (in years) = Number of woody plant species in a 30-yard section x 110

It's more of a rule of thumb than anything, but it does give you a reasonable idea of the value of British hedgerows in terms of age. One hedgerow near Bristol was dated at 800 years old. We know that they support teams of wildlife, from birds to badgers and insects, and many plant species including medicinal ones such as elder.

Blackthorn

When I first flew into England many, many years ago, the patchwork of hedgerows made me squeal with delight. Here was the tapestry landscape of Tolkein's shires. It was so familiar, yet my concept of 'hedge' was flaky at best, barely understanding that they were fences that kept livestock in and demarcated the boundaries of estates and farming land. I also had no idea of the many, many plants that could be found within them, not of their spiritual, cultural and medicinal significance. Years later I could tell the difference between a hawthorn and a blackthorn, picking sloes in the Autumn for gin and cutting walking sticks from the hawthorn, and berries for medicinal honeys and wine.

Pussy Willow

When you walk around with a camera lens and a view to capture the variety in a hedge, things get far more interesting. No longer are these green boundaries simply 'fence' or 'green' or 'twigs' but full of beautiful colours, textures and shapes. At this time of year the pussy willow is strikingly yellow and gorgeously fluffy, the holly leaves are shiny in the sunshine like a faerie queen's mirror, and the white flowers of blackthorn flutter in the light like snow.

A wild apple or a pear?

Fruit trees too poke shyly from the mess of tangled ivy, old man's beard, thorns and brambles. Come Autumn, the hedges bear fruit - apples and sloes, haws and elderberries. The pink flowers are vivid. I look for beech, sycamore, hazel and ash and find them like trading cards. We tick off flowers as we go, gathering around the base of the hedges on the road side - immune boosting cleavers and nettles, ramsons and dandelions, celandines and wild lettuce. There is forget me nots and primroses too, pale yellows and lilacs cheerily announcing Spring. I spy There's wood anemones, bluebells, dandelions and wild roses.

Sycamore heavy with lichen

In this age of lockdowns and quarantines, our worlds get strangely smaller and more vast at the same time. As the cars cease the birds are louder. No longer do the planes fly over head to and from Bristol, making it easier to notice buzzards swooping and woodpeckers tap tapping, and finches and robins tweeting. This is a populated country, but there's another life that lives alongside manmade industry and development too, one that is easier to notice when you are forcibly slowed down to observe it in all it's springtime beauty.

As the month unfolds, I'll look amongst the hedgerows for bumblebees and butterflies, for hedgehogs and dormice, robins and finches. They ignore our anxiety in a time of disease and go about their business as they have for many a year, using the hedges as corridors of wildness to eat, breed and take sanctuary.

And for a moment, I find a little sanctuary too, adjusting my focus to capture the detail of this precious, precious life.