Hedge pt IV - Butterflies!

I think most of us tend to think of butterflies (in temperate climes at least) as creatures of open meadow but many have evolved for forest or edge habitats and a number of these can be attracted to the garden by the use of the right shrubs, many of which can (if so desired) be incorporated into a hedge like the one we planted a few years back that I posted about last year. Plants will tend to attract butterflies for one of two reasons; either they provide food (in the form of nectar) to the butterfly itself, or they are an attractive egglaying site as they provide food for the subsequent caterpillars. We have plants in the hedge that do both.

Above is a buckthorn and I'm honestly not sure which. Both common (aka purging) buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) and alder buckthorn (Rhamnus frangula) were planted in the initial hedge. These plants frankly don't have much to commend them (although wikipedia tells us that the Alder Buckthorn was "of major military importance in the 15th to 19th centuries, as its wood provided the best quality charcoal for gunpowder manufacture") beyond their significance as the foodplant for the caterpillars of the fabulous, sulphur yellow Brimstone butterfly. We have seen the odd Brimstone since these went in although whether correlation equals causation in this case I can't say.

I've thrown a couple of Buddleia into gaps in the hedge too – cuttings given to us by a friend. Their form doesn't really suit hedgerow living for the most part but in our shaggy wild hedge which isn't too harshly pruned they do well. The above is a hybrid called Buddleia x weyeriana (which crosses, I think, B. davidii (the commonly seen purple, mauve or white Buddleia) with B. globosus) and as you can see it is slightly different in flower shape and very different in colour to most Buddleia. I have seen it suggested that white and yellow Buddleia are more attractive to insects than the darker coloured forms (as they are more easily seen). I haven't however seen any actual science on the subject. By way of proof that Buddleia x weyeriana is as attractive as davidii here's one with an attendant speckled wood.

Hedge Pt III: Fruits....

As we've seen hedges can provide wonderful habitats for birds and small mammals offering food and shelter. One of the more obvious ways in which they can help is where the plants chosen produce a lot of food in the form of fruit, nuts and berries. We'll look at berry producing hedgerow shrubs in another post but in this post I'll be dealing with some fruiting hedgerow shrubs and trees that will be familiar to most people. I've posted before about hedgerow apples arising from throwaway cores and also about crabapple cultivars but in this hedge what I had in mind were simple wild crabapples that would produce an abundance of small round fruit for the birds and perhaps supplement our crabapple jelly production a little. What I got when they started fruiting years later was this:

As you can see its unquestionably a cultivated fruit apple of some kind. I think what happened was this. The crabapple plants and a number of others were given to us as spares by a grower who had produced a load of native plants for the local council. It turned out later he had also produced some plants of the county's own heirloom apple cultivars (most counties in the UK have (or had) their own apple cultivars for years many of which are now lost or rare) and I'm guessing these are some of them or seedlings influenced by them. It doesn't really matter; thrushes and blackbirds will still tuck in and if I was doing this again on a bigger scale I'd be tempted to throw in wild crab apples, cutting grown (as opposed to grafted) crabapple cultivars and some random apple core seedlings in to see what sort of a mix of colour and size I ended up with (all I need now is the lottery win which will let me buy a farm to rehedge!). The same chap helpfully provided some "wild pear" which seem to be of a similar semi-wild origin. Like apples these will provide fruit for the birds and small mammals as well as insect attracting flowers.

We obtained some "true wild pears" from elsewhere so I'll await their development and fruit with interest too. The "truly wild" relatives of a couple of other fruits made it into the hedge. These were the wild cherry or gean (Prunus avium):

And the cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera)

Anyone who has tried to get a crop of their domestic relatives will be well aware of how much these fruits are appreciated by the birds. I was surprised by how big the cherry plums were; impressive fruit for what is still a small specimen. If one wants to get a bit clever, one option is to do away with wild forms and hedge entirely with things that produce fruits for human consumption (a "fedge" is the term frequently used for this but that's just ridiculous), you can even choose larger fruiting species of thorn as a base to take this to a higher level. Its worth noting that most of these species fruit better as trees and some will not fruit at all if the hedge is very neatly pruned. If like me, you like your hedges a little shaggy you'll be fine but the other option is to choose certain specimens to prune into trees rising above your neatly pruned hedge.

Cobnut cornucopia

Perusing the Daily Telegraph website's always interesting "earth" section revealed a rather interesting article on cobnuts. Apparently this year is a bumper year for cobnuts with a harvest nearly 3 times the scale usually expected. That got me to thinking and as a result I'm bumping up a post I was saving for a later date. Cob is the old english name for the nuts of the hazel (Corylus avellana) and filbert (Corylus maxima). Our Corylus were certainly producing well earlier this year. This is a bog standard Corylus avellana in the hedge.

You can't really tell from this photo but this is something a little different; Corylus avellana aurea, the golden hazel. It is a buttery yellow in life but ours is a little greenish as a result of being in some shade. You can tell this is a true hazel by the short sheath around the nut.

Which is in sharp contrast to the long sheaths below. These indicate a filbert (Corylus maxima). In this case this is the purple cultivar, Red Zellernus. I'd really like to get a nut bowl full of red and gold nuts from these two some day if we can beat the small rodents and birds to them.

The plant below is something that absolutely wouldn't have featured in a Kentish platte as described in the above article.

Corylus colurna, the Turkish hazel forms a conical tree bigger than a normal hazel and is just one of many other species worldwide. Ours is the cultivar Te Terra Red, which again produces red leaves and nuts. You can see the sheaths on these are rather different to those shown above too. I'm expecting them to be just as delicious nonetheless.

The Hedge II: The colour purple

I mentioned in the first hedge post that I'd love to do a few more hedges and one I've been pondering is an all purple hedge. I mentioned we whacked in a lot of hazel early doors but that wasn't the only member of the genus Corylus to go in. These are the (awesome) leaves of the Purple filbert (sold as either Corylus maxima purpurea or, more properly as, Corylus maxima "Red Zellernus"), the filbert being a south european species that is, for our purposes, almost identical to hazel.

Despite the odd colouration this is still a strong plant and will fend for itself in the hedge environment pretty well. It has a lot of the advantages of hazel, it responds well to pruning, produces big, lush, attractive leaves that various insects will go for and brilliantly it even produces nuts – purple nuts!

Purple filbert tends to be used as a specimen type shrub in gardens as opposed to hedges but will often produce a ring of either seedlings and/or suckers around the main plant. All our plants have come as chunks dug up from a friend's border or from around our own subsequent plants and we now have 4 or 5 kicking around and a load of our small plants potted up ready for deployment.

Probably the most famous purple hedging plant is the purple beech (above) which, as I mentioned in the last post, makes a fabulous, formal hedge. It is usually much more purple than this (especially with new growth) but these are old, shaded, leaves which have flushed green. Its perhaps worth mentioning that in addition to green and purple there are yellow and variegated forms of beech so for those so inclined a multicoloured stripey beech hedge is an option. Thus far the purple hedge would be distinctly lacking in berries. Not in our hedge but adjacent to it and sure to fit in are the purple elder (Sambucus nigra) cultivars. As with the hazel this is usually used as a standalone shrub but it will sucker well and is easily propagated so if you have (or a friend has) one you should be able to put together plenty to bulk out your purple hedge.

Assuming you don't collect the pink flowers to make what one would assume would be a rose elderflower champagne it will produce black berries beloved of all nature's creatures in autumn. Maybe don't plant this one to near to where you dry your washing/park your car.

This is the extent of the purple stuff I've got pictures of for now but if a purple hedge takes your fancy you may also want to consider the purple bird cherry (Prunus padus "Colorata"), the purple cherry plum (Prunus cerasifera vars. atropurpurea or nigra) or any of the purple-leaved crab apples (my own favourite being Malus "Royalty"), all of which will produce nectar rich flowers and later fruit whilst retaining the purple leaf motif.

In the beginning came the Hedge

Around about 14 years ago my parents (with whom I was living at the time still being in high school) acquired a field adjoining our already expansive garden. It wasn't something any of us particularly wanted but doing so protected the house and garden from potential development use by other people. We ended up planting it with rare specimen trees (a number of which have already featured on the blog) but I think the aspect of it that gives me most pleasure is the hedge we planted around it. Hence I've put together a few posts about this backbreaking little project which I hope may inspire a few more weird and awesome wildlife hedges around the world. Obviously the plants used vary from country to country and those I mention are suitable for the UK and similar European climes (but may be invasive and utterly inappropriate elsewhere where substitutes will be easy to find). Anyway lets cross the stile (rabbit fencing is also in place) and take a look under the hood.

At the time of purchase one of the 4 sides already had a "hedge" (this is the one shown above). This consisted of pure hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) and had outgrown itself to the point that it was no longer a hedge but rather a line of badly shaped trees. We chopped these all down to heights varying between 1 and 6 feet leaving a line of stumps to some outcry from one of our neighbours. By breaking the bark at various points we stimulated new growth all over the stumps (a very cool technique) and these plants started to look more like hedge as well as producing a lot more berries. Then we started adding stuff and planting 2 of the other 4 sides.

I decided I wanted the hedge to be as biodiverse as possible and over time (slightly ridiculously) over 50 different species of woody plants have been added. Whilst not all survived, many flourished and the hedge is now a bizarre tapestry of leaf shapes and shades, berries, fruit and nut alive with birdsong for most of the year. Having learned a lot from this one, I would love to do another. In fact several more. Anyway I'm going to dedicate a few posts to the hedge and in this first one I wanted to focus on some of the structural plants that make up the hedge. These are strong plants that knit together well and form a backbone through which other species can be weaved. The sensible thing is to use one or two species in this role for some consistency of growth and shape and for us that was the hawthorn already there as well as European beech (Fagus sylvatica)

Beech provides good cover as it holds its leaves and responds well to shaping and trimming. Its also good for more formal looks and supports a fair few native insects. When it gets bigger, the seeds (beech mast) are a good food source for a variety of things. If one (is in Europe and) wants a single species for a formal hedge that is still wildlife friendly I'd be tempted by beech or another of our favoured foundation plants Holly (Ilex aquifolium). I didn't fit much Holly into our hedge (although we have a second Holly hedge brewing elsewhere) as at the time I was using plants that were gifts, found around the garden, grown by me from seed and from various other sources with a view to keeping costs low but I love it.

I've seen a few hedges which use the form JC Van Tol which is an excellent choice as it means you get berries across the board (hollies are male or female so with the wild form you need both to get berries). Obviously the berries are good food for birds and small mammals and the leaves are the foodplant for at least one butterfly (the predictably named Holly Blue). We used a few other species in good numbers for structure which I'll come back to in another post notably a lot of hazel (Corylus avellana), at the time mainly because we liked the nuts and wanted a hedgeload of them, and the field maple, Acer campestre, for its beautiful glossy leaves.