Hedgerows, Constable and Hockney

Devonshire has 53,000 km of hedges and: 

the county has about one fifth of all the species-rich hedges in England. Together they are of international importance, as an historical, cultural, wildlife and landscape resource [1]. 

A typical scene of hedges in Devonshire is shown in the image above, taken by my namesake Robert Wotton [2], but a hedge is not just a hedge – they have a wide variety of structures and full descriptions can be found in the web pages of Devon County Council [3] and the Devon Hedge Group [2]: 

Across the county there are great variations in the structure of hedges and in the trees and shrubs which grow on them, reflecting location, origin, age and management. Tall beech hedges are characteristic of Exmoor and high ground in the Blackdown Hills; stone faced banks distinguish Dartmoor hedges and those of the Atlantic coast; willow is common on the wet clay soils of the Culm Measures between the moors; dogwood, spindle and wayfaring tree grow in hedges on limestone outcrops along the Channel coast; elm characterises the Redlands on either side of the River Exe; massive banks line mile after mile of sunken lanes in the South Hams; and wind-sculpted trees with gorse are distinctive of hedges of exposed coasts and uplands. 

I spent my childhood in South Devon and spent hours walking through country lanes, and along the coast. Tall hedges and hills were very familiar parts of these “rambles” and the closed-in landscape always gave me a sense of security, even when the occasional sheep dog made a determined effort to round me up. Hedgerows, most often those alongside country lanes and paths (like those in the image above from the South Devon AONB web site), were the main source of my pressed flower collection. This is what I wrote about it in Walking with Gosse [4]: 

Anything connected with Nature was a hit with me and I was presented with a chance to show my ability as a naturalist during my final year at Primary School, when Miss Bedford, our class teacher, asked us to produce a pressed flower collection.. ..I soon became absorbed by the task and collected plants on solitary walks through local lanes and woods. After returning home from each foray, plants were identified with the help of books and then each was arranged between sheets of tissue paper that, in turn, were layered between heavy encyclopaedias. After pressing and drying, each flower was placed into a book with blue paper pages and held using thin strips of sticky paper, with the common name of each plant written alongside using white crayon. In a childlike way it was quite artistic (I knew nothing of Wedgwood jasperware pottery at this time, but you can imagine how the collection looked). 

Such an activity would likely be frowned upon today, but I loved it, although I didn’t go beyond thinking about the habits of each plant and how common it was – like all children, I enjoyed finding a rarity. This changed when I was older and was introduced to Max Hooper’s ideas on dating hedges, first promoted (interestingly enough) in the Devon Naturalists Trust Journal [5]. From studies on a large number of hedges, he conceived “Hooper’s Hypothesis” that the age of a hedge (in years) = the number of woody plant species in a 30-yard section x 110 [6]. Armed with this information, natural historians could date their local hedges, although Hooper stressed that it was a general rule and didn’t work for hedges that had their origins more than a thousand years ago. It was also recognised that this “rule of thumb” should be used in conjunction with local historical records. 

I had the pleasure of listening to Max Hooper talk about hedgerows when I was a postgraduate student in the Department of Zoology at the University of Durham. As a natural historian at heart, I enjoyed hearing about his ideas and also the enthusiastic way in which he delivered them. So many of our seminars were given by eminent scientists whose work seemed far away from nature and the environment, something that is even more pronounced fifty years on. He convinced me that being a natural historian was “a good thing” and that way of thinking has influenced much of my teaching. 

Aside from natural history, I’m also fascinated by art and, in the context of this essay, the way that depictions of hedges have been used by painters. John Constable painted the hedgerows of Suffolk as an integral part of compositions – as seen in Fen Lane, East Bergholt of ca. 1817 (see below). We do not have enough detail to date the hedges, but there is a contrast between the “wild” section and the part adjacent to the field on the left. Here, workers are busy, while we look down the lane that disappears round a bend, the track having come into the picture on the lower right side and then passing through a broken gate. The hedges emphasise this perspective and our eye passes to the floodplain of a river and then to a village on the other side of the valley, with its church on the right. Toiling workers, waterways, and churches all feature in many works by Constable and reflect his attitudes, beliefs and approach to Nature. He was conscious of being the son of a wealthy mill owner, was Christian, and knew how to depict landscapes that have been altered by human activity. The composition of Fen Lane, East Bergholt is satisfying and the hedges, together with the lane, draw us in, just as they would do if we encountered this scene in real life. 

Hedges were planted to mark out fields that either had different ownership, or different types of planting or grazing. They thus provide barriers and many English artists have used hedges to emphasise depth, or to partition a landscape into areas of different colour or texture. Of course, this is not just a feature of works by English painters, but I am confining myself to these in this essay. Among contemporary English artists, hedges feature in the recent work of David Hockney and I surmise that his feeling for East Yorkshire is similar to mine for South Devon: there is a sense of nostalgia in his work. In two examples, based on iPad drawings (see below), we observe winding roads with hedges in Spring, but we don’t have enough information to date any of the hedges “painted”. In both, we are reminded of the track shown in Constable’s painting of Fen Lane, yet we have no distant view, so we don’t know our destination. In an earlier watercolour (also shown below), Hockney demonstrates the role played by gaps in hedgerows, allowing us to see distant vistas (and further hedges). They invite us to look beyond limited confines. 

Landscape artists encourage us to look closely at our environment and the way that it changes over time. Hedges are features that may last for hundreds of years, as Max Hooper has shown, and there is much to see in these habitats if we take the rime to look, or do not remove them for our convenience. It’s one of the reasons why collecting blackberries, elderberries and rosehips is such a pleasurable occupation, for the avid collector keeps an eye on hedgerows from early spring through to harvest. It’s great to be so connected to Nature, just as one is when rock-pooling, walking through woods and over hills, and any other activity where the environment, and all it contains, dominates our thoughts. We all need to look outwards from time to time. 

[1] https://devonhedges.org/devon-hedges/ 

[2] https://devonhedges.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/1_Introduction.pdf 

[3] https://www.devon.gov.uk/historicenvironment/land-management/hedges-and-the-historic-environment/ 

[4] Roger S Wotton (2020) Walking with Gosse e-book 

[5] https://naturenet.net/blogs/2007/03/21/beyond-hoopers-hypothesis-hedgerow-survey-handbook-updated/ 

[6] https://naee.org.uk/hoopers-hedgerow-history-hypothesis/ 

 

 

Hockney, Elgar and dead trees

A Bigger Picture, the exhibition of David Hockney’s landscapes, especially those of his native Yorkshire, was almost overwhelming in its scale. The paintings were mostly huge and many had such bright colours that it took some time for me to get over a sense of shock. Being a traditionalist, I liked his more naturalistic works and I found Hockney’s occasionally vivid palette to be too much for my conventional taste. There was an exception, the painting entitled Winter Timber. It was the bleakness of the subject that I found fascinating, with felled wood stacked up and ready to be taken out on a track passing through leafless, wintry trees and over the horizon in the far distance. Alongside the felled timber is a dead tree stump, an icon which appears out of place. We all put our own interpretations on what we see and for me the painting represents death and the achievements of each of our lives, which will be removed and forgotten. However, the one tree stump remains as a symbol - but of what? Of death certainly, but also of the existence beyond death of works of art (the stump that clearly meant a lot to Hockney has since been destroyed by vandals).

 

There is something about trees, and especially dead trees, that moves us. They are larger than we are and decay more slowly, remaining sometimes for decades or even centuries, as reminders of a past life. We know that one group of dead trees was of particular significance to another great English artist, the composer Sir Edward Elgar. At the end of the 1910s, Elgar became disillusioned and miserable after the devastating events of the First World War and the ending of the values of the Edwardian era. His last major work, the Cello Concerto, reflects this in having a sense of yearning for earlier times. It was also a time when Lady Elgar, his greatest support, suffered from illness and the composer must have felt intimations of mortality (to borrow from Wordsworth). Three chamber works were completed by Elgar at about the same time as the Cello Concerto and these all have an eerie, mysterious quality. We find out from Billy Reed, the violinist and good friend of Elgar’s, that a group of dead trees near Brinkwells, a cottage in Sussex that provided an escape for the Elgars, influenced the composer strongly at this time: ¹

A favourite short walk from the house up through the woods brought one clean out of the everyday world to a region prosaically called Flexham Park, which might have been the Wolf’s Glen in Der Freischütz. The strangeness of the place was created by a group of dead trees which, apparently struck by lightning, had very gnarled and twisted branches stretching out in an eerie manner as if beckoning one to come nearer, To walk up there in the evening when it was just getting dark was to get “the creeps”..

   ..The rather oriental and fatalistic themes in the quintet, and the air of sadness in the quartet, like the wind sighing in those dead trees - I can see it all whenever I play any of these works, or hear them played. Elgar was such a nature-lover and had such an impressionable mind that he could not fail to be influenced by such surroundings. There was so powerful a fascination for him there that he was always strolling up to look at the scene again.

In Portrait of Elgar, ² Michael Kennedy records that Lady Elgar referred to these late chamber works as “wood magic” and she made direct reference to the dead trees as having an influence on the Quintet. It was the “curse” of being struck by lightning that provided the force - these were not trees that had died naturally, but ones which had been killed by an outside force. You can hear the mysterious quality of the work in this clip of a fine performance:

 

So, two great artists inspired by dead trees; one by cut timber and a single stump and the other by a group of dead trees killed by lightning. Of the very large number of trees in Great Britain, it was these that acted as inspirations. For all of us, dead trees remind us of what we leave behind, whether we are great artists or not.

¹ W.H.Reed (1936) Elgar as I knew him. London, Victor Gollancz.

² Michael Kennedy (1968) Portrait of Elgar. Oxford, Oxford University Press.