In 2014 I wrote a few blogs about a puzzling hedge (see here, here, here).
The resolution to the puzzle was that a farmer had driven down the road with his spray still on and had, accidentally, sprayed over a mile of roadside hedge .
Time for an update – this is the fourth spring since the accidental devastation of this hedgerow. And if a hedge can’t look good on a sunny day in May, when can it look good?
Here are four pairs of photographs, taken today. In each case the first image is the ‘sprayed four years ago’ hedge and the second is the hedge on the other side of the road.
This is still a massively damaged hedgerow – and remember, this accident affected about a mile of hedgerow.
It’s going to take a long time for this hedgerow to recover fully – it has made progress, but not that much progress, in four years. The fate of this hedge is a metaphor for environmental damage as a whole; it can take minutes to damage the environment and years for it to recover.
Pair 1:
Pair 2:
Pair 3:
Pair 4:
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Yikes. It is bad enough when the local boy racers misread the road and take out a fifty or so feet upside down.
I was thinking about your hedge today, strangely enough.
I went out with dog this morning to village field and found tree felling team beginning the process of taking down absolutely huge oak in neighbouring garden.
The felling has been stopped, the team said they had questioned that it should be done but landholder wanted to build (no planning permission in place). Local council now involved, hoping for emergency preservation order, but do you know what the chances are realistically? Can you just decide the fell a tree like that?
Hilary – not my area of expertise but you almost certainly need a felling licence – I think! https://www.forestry.gov.uk/england-fellinglicences
There could be a precedent with Sladden Woods in Kent back in the late seventies, where a TPO was issued despite the fact that the landowner had attempted to bulldoze the wood to the ground. The stumps of the wood recovered from the vandalism and is now a Kent Wildlife Trust reserve. See Richard Mabey’s The Common Ground and here: http://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/reserves/sladden-wood. There’s also the more recent example of The Sanctuary in Derby (though not specific to trees/TPOs). If the required permissions haven’t been obtained and the felling was stopped part through your oak could recover perhaps – it would end up being more like a pollarding rather than a felling perhaps?