Hedge
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a fence of growing shrubs. The British Isles and northern Italy are famous for hedges. In many localities they are an entire substitute for stone walls and wooden fences. The hedgerows of the English and Irish countryside are the delight of tourists. The British hedge is formed usually of hawthorn. It has a strong spiny growth, quite sufficient to turn cattle. The hare escapes from its enemies by slipping through the hedges from one field to another; the hedgehog finds protection beneath the thorny branches. If it were not for hedges in which they nest and find refuge from hawke many singing birds would be exterminated in parts of Europe. The planting and pruning of hedges is a trade in itself. The young plants are started in nurseries, and are set closely in a strip of well prepared ground. The shrubs require to be pruned annually in order to maintain a close, strong growth. A triangular cross section, like the sharpened gable end of a house, is considered the best, because it does not afford a lodgment for snow. In the United States the best substitute for fencing is the osage orange . Unfortunately, however, it winter kills north of a line drawn through Iowa and Illinois. Evergreen hedges are planted frequently as windbreaks. A large number of shrubs are planted to form ornamental screens, inclosures, and private grounds, borders for walks, and purely ornamental hedges. The crab, holly, privet, flowering maple, barberry, broom, willow, yew, box, arbor vitae, the honey locust , and the Cherokee rose are favorites for ornamental purposes.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote in 1910 that hedgerows were "the delight of tourists" and an entire substitute for walls and fences, Britain's hedge network was near its peak. Mechanised farming and government grants for field enlargement then removed roughly half of it: something on the order of 100,000 miles of hedge was grubbed out in England and Wales between the 1940s and the 1990s, before the Hedgerows Regulations of 1997 made removing most countryside hedges without permission an offence. Hedges are now valued less as stockproof barriers than as wildlife corridors and carbon stores, and grants flow the other way, paying farmers to lay and replant them. The hedgehog Aiton's mentions sheltering under the thorns is itself now a species of conservation concern in Britain, its decline linked partly to the loss of those same hedges.
Written for this edition, 2026.