Hedges: without them, we'd be no better than the damn French (and plus they'd beat us up)

[More from Estates Gazette, 1884]

The British hedgerow is a national institution. Without it, or its equivalent in stonewall countries, an English landscape might, for any difference striking enough to catch the passing eye, be a Belgian or a French one. The peculiar golden green of flax crops, the snowy expanses of beck wheat, and the red broad veins of the tobacco leaf may occur, it is true, less often, or not at all, in English acres to diversify the agricultural outlook from a railway car. But these are details. Whereas the presence of hedgerows trailing one after another past the carriage windows is full, to the Englishman returning from his travels, of wakening reminiscences of home-life in England, nowhere else. The national idea of comfort and secluded cosiness as the equivalent for happiness has been traced from time to time to many things, but a philosophic mind should see no difficulty in digging up the roots of the national sentiment from the bottom of the quick-set hedges that shelter each homestead from blasting winds and peering strangers.

Take an English cottage, with its little garden surrounded by an hedge, a cornfield on one side surrounded by a hedge, a pasture on the other surrounded by a hedge, an orchard at the back surrounded by a hedge, and a highway in front hedged in on both sides, and we have ample ground for supposing that cosiness, homeliness, and all the domestic virtues could not fail to take root and flourish in such a pot. Take away the hedges, and we have only a solitary cottage standing prominently out to the public gaze in a wide plain by the side of a public road. At once we can understand how the inhabitants of such a homestead, feeling that their every action is more or less performed in public, that their houses can be criticised from roof to basement by each curious passerby, and here at once we have the ground-work of the Continental weakness for out-of-door display and showy publicity. When, further, it is remembered that the two classes of dwelling have been for ages characteristic of whole countries, we can imagine how the instincts thus engendered have developed into national features more marked than any other, though only a few miles of sea may separate the owners…

Another argument, too, should not be forgotten. Patriotism, it is true, is getting out of date, but a famous English general has said, and it was greatly to his credit, that no invading army, battles of Dorking and Guildford notwithstanding, could ever reach London in the face of our volunteers and our hedges. Each highway, each orchard, each potato field would have to be sown thick with corpses and ploughed deep with cannon shot before the enemy could pass. Now, just when the Channel Tunnel scheme, scotched, but not killed, is recovering strength in secret to rear its head again in public, is a bad time to speak of abolishing what, next to the seas around these islands, is the main protection of our island home.