How many tens of thousands of miles of living hedgerow - do we have in Ireland? Our linear forest, some call it. But don't make the mistake of applying the word ordinary, or similar familiar belittlement to these hedgerows. A week or two ago that small thoughtful radio sermon of a couple of hundred words which is A Living Word (was it once Thought for Today?) was sleepily heard about 1 a.m. It told of an American visitor to this country who had been entranced by mile after mile of the brilliant white of the hawthorn in full blossom and the same for the flower of the elder. Everywhere he or she went it was at the height of the flowering. It's nearly all gone, here on the east side of the country, but store up your admiration for it next year.
It really is a treasure that most of us simply take for granted; you can drive for a day and hardly ever be out of sight of it. Of course, experts remind us, the present day pattern of hawthorn hedgerows interspersed with single trees is comparatively recent. They were, writes Eileen McCracken in The Irish Woods Since Tudor Times, "an innovation of the late 17th century." Before that, demarcations were often minimal and where there was a planted boundary it was usually whins or furze. (A line from, roughly, Drogheda to Westport divides the users of the word whins from the furze people, according to A. T. Lucas's fine volume Furze.) He gives a Cavan rhyme:
Green fields and whinny ditches,
A nice girl and to hell with riches.
Thorn hedges need care. If you let them grow without attention, they become half trees and you soon have a yard of trunk without any branches. Animals can get in and out easily. The mechanical hedge cutter can be imaginatively used to spare the hedge tree. Meath goes for ash, and it adds to the scenery, and eventually gives fuel. The saplings keep on coming.