currants in a hedgerow

Hedgerows are living fences

"They spoke of how beautiful the land was in spring, full of flowering plums, crabapples and hawthorns bordering the roads, how their mothers went berrying along the hedgerows in summer in order to make pies and jam, how they themselves, when young, collected nuts in the fall in woodlots and along fencerows marked by tall, old hickory trees. They remembered a landscape full of birds, bees, butterflies and small game—full of life."
Adrian Ayres Fisher, Just what is a hedgerow?


What are hedgerows?

hedgerows offer food, shelter, and nesting sites for a diversity of our Earthly kin
Image: Des haies pour la biodiversité, Le Gran Lyon

Hedgerows are long skinny pocket forests, living fences, green corridors or what Robert Mellinger beautifully describes as

“a snaking berm of exuberance that draws you into the symphony of the living world."

They're rich tapestries of native trees, shrubs, vines, wildflowers, grasses, and sedges that form incredibly important edge habitats (transitional zones where two habitats meet).

 

Why plant hedgerows?

No matter how small your yard, you can design a hedgerow that offers tremendous benefits for yourself, your neighbours, and our Earthly kin. But it's at the landscape scale where their incredible gifts fully manifest as they help weave together fragmented landscapes, strengthen habitat connectivity, and offer food, shelter, nesting sites, and safe passage to our Earthly kin.

Every hedgerow, pocket meadow, or pocket forest we plant becomes a stepping stone, enhancing habitat connectivity.

Gifts of hedgerows for our Earthly kin

song sparrow babies in nest

The structural layers and rich diversity of plants in a hedgerow mimic the forest edge, supporting our Earthly kin by:

  • Offering host plants, pollen, and nectar for hundreds of species of insects, including butterflies, moths, and bees
  • Providing year-round habitat for pollinators and other insects, who need the leaves, bark, branches, dried stems and leaf litter for nesting, protection from predators, and overwintering
  • Producing a bounty of berries, seeds, nuts, and insects which nourish birds throughout the seasons
  • Offering safe nesting habitat for birds
  • Providing safe passageway for toads, snakes, moths, and bats who use hedgerows to navigate across the landscape
  • Sheltering butterflies, moths and other flying insects from wind, allowing them to gain, and retain, the heat they need to fly
  • Nourishing a thriving soil food web, improve soil health, moderate soil temperature, and retain soil moisture through layers of decomposing leaves, stems, dead insects, and bird droppings
  • Strengthening genetic diversity within species, attract new species, and help plants migrate by connecting isolated patches into habitat corridors
  • Keeping waters healthy by filtering contaminants, fertilizers, pesticides, and sediment
  • Reducing the spread of invasive species

Gifts of hedgerows for humans

blackberries and admiral butterfly in a hedgerow

Hedgerows are a natural climate solution:

  • Helping our city breathe by reducing nitrogen dioxide air pollution, filtering contaminants, and sequestering particulate and gaseous airborne pollutants
  • Turning our city into a sponge, reducing flood risk, absorbing rainwater, and recharging groundwater
  • Reducing the urban heat island effect, cooling homes and neighbourhoods
  • Increasing food sovereignty, providing berries, fruits, nuts, and medicines for foraging
  • Reducing noise pollution, creating quiet sanctuary
  • Buffering strong winds, forcing them upwards and away
  • Creating privacy and defining property lines
  • Sequestering carbon both above ground and in the soil

Designing hedgerows

dominique soltner, design ideas for planting hedgerows

Image: modified from Dominique Soltner, Planter des haies

As you can see from this diagram by Dominque Soltner, there are many ways of incorporating hedgerows and pocket forests into your landscape. Depending on your design goals, you can vary height, number of species, species selection, and layering.

Keep in mind that the greater the structural diversity, density, and complexity of the design, the more biodiversity the hedgerow will support.

Maximize biodiversity

"Where there are hedgerows of non-native plants (compared with native plant hedgerows), there were 68% fewer species of caterpillars, 91% fewer numbers of caterpillars and 96% less biomass/energy of food for birds and thus 96% less bird biomass."

    When designing your hedgerow, think about the birds, insects, or other wildlife you'd like to support. For example, birds like Chickadees, Titmice, Nuthatches, and Finches forage for food in trees or tall shrubs. Other birds, like Juncos, Sparrows, Towhees, and Doves forage on the ground. Many birds rely on hedgerows for nesting. Some, like Juncos and Song Sparrows, nest hidden in the ground layer while others, like Goldfinches and Cardinals, nest in dense shrubs or thickets. During breeding season, 96% of terrestrial birds (including Hummingbirds) rely on insects to feed their young. Then in fall and winter, birds rely on berries and seeds to fuel up for migration or for overwintering. In spring, birds consume buds, insects attracted to spring flowers, and insects hiding in leaf litter.

    To maximize biodiversity, here are some design elements to consider.

    • Large trees: include keystone trees like Oaks, Cherries, Birches, Maples, and Hickories who support hundreds of insect species and benefit birds, bats, invertebrates and more. Birds also use trees as song posts and territory markers. 
    • Diverse understory: choose a variety of understory trees and shrubs that provide year round nectar, berries, nuts, fruits, seeds, and buds to support bird and invertebrate diversity (insects, ants, beetles, spiders, worms, bees, beetles).
    • Thicket forming shrubs: include shrubs like Gray Dogwood (Cornus racemosa), Silky Dogwood (C. amomum), Wild Roses (Rosa spp.), Chokeberry (Aronia), and Brambles (Rubus spp.) to provide nesting areas for birds and berries throughout the season.
    • Ground layer: create a rich ground layer by leaving leaf litter, logs and stumps to decay naturally and planting ground hugging plants such as Wild Strawberry and Sedges to  provide habitat for predaceous ground beetles, shelter for fireflies, and overwintering habitat for other beneficial insects.
    • Flowering edge: plant a flowering edge bursting with native flowers and grasses offers valuable habitat for nesting birds, insects, reptiles, and small mammals and helps ensure nectar, seeds, and berries throughout the seasons. Larvae of many butterflies and other invertebrates feed on the grasses and wildflowers along the edge.
    • Connectivity: link the hedgerow to trees, water sources, woodland habitat or neighbouring hedges.
    • Microhabitats: create microhabitats using rocks, stumps, and logs to offer hiding places, food sources, and nesting sites for beetles, toads, snakes, wild bees, birds and more.
    • Nesting sites: install birdhouses, bat houses, leave bare patches for ground nesting bees, and flower stalks for stem-nesting bees.
    • Support at risk species: plant host-specific plants such as Milkweeds for Monarchs, Hop Trees (Ptelea trifoliata) for Giant Swallowtail Butterflies, and Oaks for Red-Headed Woodpeckers, Cynipid Wasps, and the many other Oak specialist species.

    Stagger plants for a natural look

    hedgerow spacing

    If you have space (or if you can collaborate with a neighbour), plan for a depth of 3 or more metres, staggering plants for a natural look.

    Rules of thumb for plant spacing vary widely. We're experimenting with 2-3 plants per square metre.

    Let's grow a City in a Forest

    "The vexed question of what we do on our own private properties is of deep importance to our cities’ future resilience. Urban hedgerows have a potentially large part to play in a climate changing present and future by adding biodiversity and connectivity, providing habitat, managing water and storing carbon. And for humans at a time of economic uncertainty, when we need to develop sustainable, resilient livelihoods in cities just as in the country, managed hedgerows can provide fuel, food and materials.  They can be considered a form of meliorative restoration, or rewilding that benefits humans as well as other species."


    Cities are both embedded within and ecologically linked to their surrounding landscapes. Imagine the sounds, smells, and sights of the City in a Forest that emerges as we plant hedgerows in allyship with plants, soil life, climate, geology, land, and water to weave a web of reciprocity towards Earthly flourishing.

    References