Hedgerow (where the domestic and the wild mix and mingle)

Hedgerow (where the domestic and the wild mix and mingle) - theHumm February 2021

By Susie Osler

I ride a friend’s beautiful big black horse Izzy out into the fields on a farm east of Perth. It is a gloriously eerie afternoon in late November. A wet snow has fallen on not-yet-frozen ground and now a thick, vaporous veil of fog has gathered over the land.

Izzy is a game companion and I anticipate the adventure we have ahead of us. When the curtain of fog closes around us, separating us from buildings and barns, suddenly I am transported into the pages of childhood books — a girl on a pony, venturing across small fields, passing through portals in thorny hedgerows and onto the damp, dim, mist-shrouded moors — a landscape from which the stories and myths of my ancestors arose. Anything has become imaginable.

The lay of this land is unfamiliar. I have been out only once previously — on a clear day — and have just the vaguest sense of this farm’s terrain and its patchwork of small, sheep-grazed pastures; swatches of ground, bounded by invisible hedgerows that today advance and retreat like charcoal waves, rolling in and out of the fog. There is no horizon, and all reference points, including the ground, have vanished. There is only the movement of a horse under me, the sound of her breathing and a weird feeling of being weightless on the land. We moon-walk through the landscape together, moving deeper into the fog. An opening in a hedgerow bordering the field appears and we pass through.

Hedges and hedgerows have ancient associations with witches, boundaries and boundary crossing. The words “hedge” and “hag” in fact, have intertwined meanings. Hag in Old English, Haag in Dutch, and Hecke in German are all related words meaning “hedge” or “enclosure”. To “hedge-ride” was to have the ability to straddle two worlds — the civilized world of village life and the untamed otherworld — the wilds beyond the hedge. Such talents were associated with witches, hags, “edgy” old crones, and otherworldly beings who inhabited the edgelands and feral places. Is it coincidental that that we find “edge” hidden in the word “hedge”?

In parts of England, hedgerows have been tended and appreciated as integral parts of rural ecologies and histories. Ancient hedgerows are embedded in the British landscape and tell the story of human settlement, land enclosure and use. Hedgerows in Ontario, although different in composition and appearance than their European relatives, trace, through their living lines, our own local history of colonization, land privatization and changing patterns of land use.

Does the tended field keep wildness at bay? Does the hedgerow contain the domestic? Or do they complement one another? Research regularly asserts the ecological benefits that hedgerows provide to soil health, conservation and biodiversity. Yet, in spite of this, humans continue to strip away these remaining vestiges of wild life from rural landscapes, under the monikers of efficiency and yield. But at what cost? Verges and hedges are edge-places where the domestic and the wild mix and mingle. We need feral fringes where wildness roams, control withers and imagination can take hold. We are suffering from tameness and the erosion of wild landscapes that once were steeped in stories that are no longer perceptible. The erasure of the wild leads to an erasure of imagination.

Izzy and I weave through hedgerows and fields, one following the next with a rhythm driven by soft steps and steamy exhalations. Arborous apparitions reach out from the shadowy perimeters, poking through the membrane of my imagination. Is that a howl I hear? Is that a Werewolf emerging from the right? My imagination is being exercised!

Or, just maybe, is it the voice of the hedgerow speaking to me in its own edgy tongue?

We stop under the limb of an apple tree that was likely seeded — with the help of a sheep, cow or bird — in an old fence line a lifetime or two ago, when these fields were first carved from forest by settlers. Now, arcing over my head, the tree’s withered, barely-red apples dangle precariously like earrings. I stretch up, pluck a few, give one to Izzy who bends her nose around, and pocket the others. We step back through the landscape in our cloud capsule — through fields and hedgerow portals, eventually landing back in the sanctuary of the barn.

I drive home along Highway 7 — my mind and body still lit up from my adventure into the wild crannies of new terrains — the physical and imaginal both. The fog has lifted from the land. I see horizons again. Passing by a long, sloping field flanking the highway I notice, suddenly, an old, thick hedgerow — probably a century old — being razed. Two huge slash piles of branches burn — pyres of orange-red flame and ascending soot. Mythic in scale.

Progress and control — a couplet of concepts that has fuelled the colonization of this land and perhaps, too, the colonization of our collective imagination — continue to assert their influence upon the landscape.

How can we learn to become easy with the wild — to relearn her vocabularies? Might we learn to see the unmanageable and uncontrolled spaces in our midst and our minds not as something in need of taming, homogenizing or killing, but rather as something precious and essential — a feral foundation and literal lifeline providing us with the diversity, vigour, creativity and resilience that our domesticated bodies and imaginations desperately need? When and how will we learn to value, attend to and learn from the edgy, peripheral places? It is time for a new kind of Hedge School* to arise, one suited to our times.

*Hedge schools were small, informal, illegal schools, particularly in 18th- and 19th-century Ireland, designed to secretly provide education to children of “non-conforming” faiths. They were often held behind hedges in order to remain secret.

Kaija Savinainen —A Brush with a Gifted Environmental Activist - theHumm February 2021

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

When theHumm first featured oil painter Kaija Savinainen Mountain (her married name) in 2007, she responded to my inevitable question as to why she created her art with this statement: “I have a terrible need to create. It chases me.” She has continued her race to the top of her creative powers, but she has raised the bar on her ambitions. Today her answer is: “Nature needs our respect and care more than ever these days, and I challenge us all to be mindful of......

Hedgerow (where the domestic and the wild mix and mingle) - theHumm February 2021