The traditional British hedge is fast vanishing

Five years ago, a documentary about the Duchy of Cornwall featured the then Prince of Wales in tweeds and jaunty red gauntlets laying a hawthorn hedge. It was a brilliant piece of PR. If Charles was a safe pair of hands with a hedge – something as quintessentially English as a hay meadow or a millpond – he was surely a safe pair of hands full stop.

Focusing on a hedge in south-west Wiltshire, Hedgelands combines history, celebration, lament and warning. Christopher Hart is a companionable writer, and makes a powerful case that, at a time of ecological hazard, well-nurtured hedges can play an astonishing role in buttressing the future.

First, though, the past. There is evidence of hedge-laying in this country going back 4,500 years, and ‘Judith’s Hedge’ in Cambridgeshire is at least 900 years old – older than either Windsor Castle or Westminster Abbey. The best hedges, scruffy as scarecrows and colossal as cathedrals, teem with small mammals – shrews, wood mice, bank voles, rabbits, badgers and stoats; reptiles and amphibians; and what John Clare called ‘the merry minstrelsy’ of birds, from robins and song thrushes to willow warblers, yellowhammers and linnets.

Hart savours names. A roll call of plants growing in the Underhill hedge round which the book revolves reads like a ready-made poem by John Betjeman: bluebell, celandine, dog’s mercury, early purple orchid, ground ivy… He’s good at connecting us to England’s wilder and more beautiful past, ‘concealed beneath the modern names of the most urbanised and unpicturesque of places’. Who would have guessed that Croydon means ‘the valley where the wild saffron grows’?

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But, while conjuring up rose-tinted olden days, Hart’s more urgent desire is to demonstrate the vital part that hedges have to play as we move into an increasingly perilous future – a ‘human-made mass extinction, the sixth or possibly the seventh in Earth’s history’.