CHAPTER XIX 



CLIMBING PLANTS 



T T is difficult to exaggerate the beauty of our English 

 1. hedgerows. They are a characteristic feature of 

 much of the most charming scenery, of a calm and sober 

 character, in our home counties. And it seems to be 

 a feature of comparatively modern introduction. 



Macaulay tells us in a striking passage descriptive 

 of the appearance of the country-side in the middle 

 of the seventeenth century that few hedgerows were 

 to be seen. It is clear, he says, from the books 

 and maps of the period that many highways which 

 now pass through an endless succession of orchards 

 and meadows and cornfields then ran through nothing 

 but moorland and swamp and warren. In the draw- 

 ings of English landscape made in that age hardly 

 a hedgerow, he declares, is to be seen, and numerous 

 tracts, now rich in cultivation, appear as bare as 

 Salisbury Plain. 



A comparison of the country-side in the south or west 

 of England with that of the fenland around Cambridge 

 or in the Isle of Ely will reveal at once how much we 

 owe to our hedgerows. Or, to take another illustration, 

 during the period of agricultural depression which 

 marked the closing decades of the last century, a 

 number of hedgerows in East Essex were stubbed up as 

 prejudicial to the growth of corn, and the appearance 



138 



