Sir, – Living in rural Ireland, I am struck each year at the decimation of the hedgerows in late winter, just about the time the wood pigeon starts calling. This year, after a milder winter, the birds are beginning to nest just as the cutting starts. Since they are scheduled by variation in temperature and other natural phenomena, the timing of the cutting of their habitats is significant.
Each time I walk outdoors on our country roads, my imaginary bottles of late summer elderberry cordial, pots of autumn blackberry jam, crab-apple jelly, bilberry smoothies and delicious glasses of sloe gin are quickly disappearing.
Ireland draws people to this country because of its natural and unspoiled beauty. It is a place of very low forestation and what is grown as forestry is largely “product” and not habitat. Our hedgerows are home to a plethora of herbs, lichen, mosses, grasses, shrubs, flowers, fruit and trees. These, in turn, support birds, animals, insects and invertebrates and my own good health.
Old trees on hedgerows are particularly precious. Everything from their branches, to their roots, all their holes and crevices provide nesting, roosting and feeding, as well as links between burrows.
In other words, hedgerows are testimony to the beauty and diversity and remaining wildness of our landscape. They need regenerative management and an eye to preserving the delicate.
Ireland Inc brands our wildness to draw tourists while the hedgerow shredders “clean up” the landscape and reduce it to homogenous tidiness, on a bureaucratic schedule. – Yours, etc,
MARGARET O’CONNOR,
Millstreet,
Co Cork.