HEDGELANDS

Sub-titled 'A Wild Wander Around Britain's Greatest Habitat', this joyful journey takes us around the wild borders of Britain, through the life, ecology and history of the humble hedge. An ancient, human-made boundary, hedgerows have long been an important haven for wildlife and are now recognised as one of the greatest 'edge' habitats on earth. Through Christopher Hart's experience of rewilding a patch of land in Wiltshire, we see how easy and rewarding it is to restore even the smallest stretch of hedge while all around us hedgerows are being neglected or torn up. The book shows us this unsung environmental hero recreating long-lost thickets and woodland edges, offering resilient homes for birds such as the elusive dunnock, the industrious hedgehog and the miniscule harvest mouse as well as an abundance of insect life. The book is an enjoyable ramble down 'the tangled green lanes of the beleaguered British countryside', as we meet treefrogs and hedgehogs and learn about hedges as carbon banks and about bodgers, brummocks and flailers, hedge cutting ancient and modern and the author's 300 yards of beautiful, unkempt, pullulating hedgerows in Wiltshire. He has also been widely published under the pen name of William Napier. 197 pages, eight pages of colour photos.