Wildlife-friendly ways to manage a country hedge

A hedge is the hardest-working strip of land you own

Few things on a country smallholding earn their keep like a good hedge. It marks the boundary, shelters stock, slows the wind, holds the soil on a slope and, if you let it, feeds and houses a quite extraordinary amount of wildlife. Get the management right and you have a larder, a nursery and a motorway all in one. Get it wrong and you end up with a gappy, leggy line of sticks that shelters nothing much and has to be replanted within a decade.

The good news is that wildlife-friendly doesn't mean neglected. It means cutting at the right time, cutting in the right shape, and leaving a bit of mess behind. Here's how to do it.

Time your trimming for late winter, not autumn

The single most useful thing you can do is put the trimmer away until the turn of the year. Hens and songbirds will thank you for it. Hedgerow berries — haws, sloes, hips, elderberries, the lot — are the winter larder for redwings, fieldfares, blackbirds and, in a hard snap, just about everything else. Cut in September or October and you strip that larder out before the birds have had a chance at it.

Leave the hedge alone until January or February, once the berries have been worked through and the worst of the weather has passed. That timing also keeps you clear of the nesting season: it is an offence to damage or destroy a wild bird's nest while it is in use, and hedges are the nest site of choice for dunnocks, whitethroats, yellowhammers and linnets. As a rule, avoid cutting between March and the end of August entirely.

One more caution: don't cut when the wood is wet or frosty, or when the ground is waterlogged. You'll smear the cuts, invite disease and churn the ground beneath into a bog. Sharp blades on a dry, mild day make clean wounds that heal.

Cut every second or third year, in sections

Annual trimming is the enemy of a wildlife hedge. It removes the previous year's growth, and with it the blossom and the fruit, so you get a tidy green box that flowers rarely and feeds nothing. Hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and field maple all flower on older wood, so a light annual pass is still a heavy loss.

A far better approach is a rotation:

• Cut one side per year, leaving the other side to grow on and fruit.
• Or cut a third of the length each year, so every stretch gets a two-year rest and some of the hedge is always thick, tall and fruiting.
• Or simply trim every third winter, if the hedge isn't in a position where it must be kept neat.

Aim for a rotation that gives each section at least two full growing seasons between cuts. That's enough for a decent crop of berries and for the insects and small mammals to re-establish.

Leave the berries, and plant for the winter larder

If you are planting or gapping up, think about what fruits when. A traditional mix of roughly 60 per cent hawthorn, 20 per cent blackthorn and the rest made up of hazel, field maple, dog rose, guelder rose, spindle, holly, crab apple and elder gives you blossom from March through to June and fruit from late summer right through to February.

Holly deserves a special mention. It is slow, prickly and unfashionable, but its berries sit high on the bush through the hardest weeks of the year, and its dense evergreen growth is first-class nesting cover. Ivy along the base does the same job. Both are worth tolerating, even encouraging.

When you do cut, resist the urge to take everything. Leaving the odd tall stem or unclipped sprig at intervals gives birds a song post and a lookout, and it costs you nothing.

Aim for a wide bottom and a ragged top

The classic flail-cut hedge has vertical sides and a flat top, and it is a slow death sentence. With no light reaching the base, the bottom goes bare and gappy, the hedge lifts off the ground, and the wildlife value collapses.

Instead, cut a slight A-shape in cross-section — wider at the base, tapering to the top — so daylight reaches the bottom stems and they keep growing. Keep the height up as well: a hedge of 2 metres or more, with a base 1.5 metres or wider, shelters far more birds and insects than a knee-high box. If you must keep it low for a sightline, leave the height elsewhere along the same hedge.

Don't strim, spray or rotavate the ground at the base. That rough tussocky margin is where voles, shrews, beetles and slow worms live, and where hedgehogs forage. A metre of unmown, scruffy grass either side of the hedge is worth more than most of what happens above it.

Gapping up, laying and leaving a bit of mess

If your hedge has holes you can see a dog through, fill them with native whips planted in a double row and protected with a spiral guard against rabbits. That's a job for bare-root planting between November and March.

For a hedge that has grown tall, leggy and thin at the base, traditional laying is the answer. Part-cutting the stems near the ground and bending them over at an angle rejuvenates the whole thing, triggers dense new growth from the base and gives you a stock-proof barrier for another twenty years. Laying one section a winter is a satisfying way to work through a long hedge, and it is best done at the same time of year as any other cutting.

Finally, leave the arisings in a quiet corner rather than burning them. A heap of hedge trimmings, twiggy and half-shaded, is a hibernation site for hedgehogs, a basking spot for reptiles and a nesting place for wrens. A wildlife hedge is a slightly untidy thing, and that is very much the point.