Project Hedgerow

Originally published on September 12, 2024.
Last Updated on September 15, 2024.

Good fences make good neighbour’s.

With that in mind I’m planning to build a classic English Hedgerow around my property.  We’ve recently received new neighbour’s that I’m not super interested in interacting with and whose new ugly modern monstrosity of a house I don’t want to see.  Enter the hedgerow. 

The plan is to close off my property with a mixture of Hawthorn, Silver Buffaloberry, Cherry, Raspberry, Willow, Wild Rose and whatever else with thorns that I can grow in a 2 meter wide space to create an impenetrable living wall.  I probably won’t get to the point of weaving the trees together, but the combination of thorns and closely planted trees allowed to mesh together should create the wall I want.

As I progress on this project, I’ll add to this post. 

July 19, 2020 

The 1st part of this project is to collect and propagate enough trees and bushes to start planting.  Today I collected 50 new growth clippings from the only wild Hawthorn tree I know of in the area.  I believe the tree is a Fleshy Hawthorn, but will reserve final ID for when I have had a better chance to research and observe the donor tree.

While in the same area I also collected about 30 clippings of Silver Buffaloberry.  This is another thorny bush native to this part of Canada, but still pretty rare around here.  

I dipped all the sprigs in rooting hormone and planted them into Peat Moss.  The plan is to keep the leave moist long enough for roots to take.  This may not work with the Hawthorn … research shows that they are tough to root using this method.  But we will try.