A well-known text suggests that the human race kicked off in a garden and was subsequently kicked out. Inside good, outside bad.
There was a boundary to this garden. In fact, the word ‘paradise’, virtually synonymous with Eden, implies an enclosed space.
Whether or not you take the Genesis account literally there can be little doubt that our species has, for a long time, been involved in the enclosure of land for horticultural purposes, defining the boundary of that enclosed space with a hedge, a fence, or a wall and occasionally all three.
Initially the idea was to deter intruders, human or otherwise, from stealing your crops, or worse. For that purpose a fence or wall would serve just as well as a hedge, as it would were the enclosure used to contain livestock.
In the Airdlin Croft title deeds the surrounding hawthorn hedge is listed as an asset that either has to be maintained or replaced by a stock-proof post-and-wire fence.
However, it was for another reason that that hawthorn hedge attracted us to Airdlin Croft. For the previous ten years we had been involved in an organic market garden project on another croft just a mile away. We had learned – from truly bitter experience – that the main impediment to gardening in this part of Aberdeenshire is the wind.
In 1983 we were looking for another place to garden; and that overgrown hawthorn hedge, along with a line of ancient ash trees, helped us identify the place where we have lived ever since.
A well-kept hedge can keep livestock in the field but even a tatty one can slow the wind down. Over the years that original hawthorn hedge has been pruned with various levels of severity – with some individual members almost untouched, trees of thirty feet or more, and other sections tight-clipped to six feet high. Other hedges have been planted, predominantly of beech, which hangs on to its dead foliage well into the Spring. Our newest hedge runs for three hundred meters alongside our track and is composed of hawthorn, hazel, hornbeam, blackthorn and field maple, with oak standards at thirty meter intervals.
All of these hedges help to create a micro-climate that favours horticulture. We are currently attempting to establish a shelterbelt around a new piece of land, outwith the enchanted space enclosed by those ancient hawthorns. At the same time we are tentatively planting out trees and shrubs inside the embryonic shelterbelt – and have sustained losses of plants that grow happily in the hedge-protected, old garden, victims of the relentless winds. We need to be patient.
Even some of the shelterbelt trees have required re-staking, though this in part is, I believe, a negative consequence of growing them in shelters: they can grow too well too fast and the root system can’t support the heavy crown.
Adam and Eve were probably not bothered by the wind but they would have wanted to keep the wildlife out. Perversely, and satisfyingly so, as a consequence of having been severely bothered by the wind, our hedges, shelterbelts and woodland are keeping the wildlife in – where it is wanted.