The revoluTion in agriCulTure^105some sandy areas of eastern England, especially Breckland, Scots pine hedges
were favoured; while a few hedges were planted with more exotic species,
such as the Duke of Argyll’s Tea Plant Lycium barabarum, introduced from
China in the 1730s. Whatever was planted, single-species hedges – especially
if trimmed rather than regularly laid or coppiced – will have supported a
smaller range of species than more substantial and more intensively managed
ones, containing a greater range of shrubs.^67 They provided less food for
birds and lacked the diversity of structure provided by the recurrent cycles
of cutting and regrowth. Most of the new hedges, moreover, did not have
much in the way of an accompanying bank or ditch and in arable districts
farmers ploughed close, leaving only narrow lines of unploughed ground,
poor substitute for the ribbons of pasture running through the old open
fields or (in many areas) the myriad of balks which had formerly divided
the individual lands. Babbington in 1860 bemoaned how, as a consequence
of enclosure in west Cambridgeshire ‘the “balks”, with the various plants
which grew upon them’ had been ‘destroyed by the plough. Thus the native
plants have suffered... Where they were once abundant they are now rarely
to be found’.^68 In arable areas, moreover, the new rectangular fields were
often very large. Those on the Yorkshire Wolds generally covered between
30 and 70 acres^69 : on the Lincolnshire Wolds they were said to be ‘30 to 100
acres, presenting to the eye of the stranger the aspect of open-field lands’
because the hedges were often concealed by the rolling topography.^70 Not
surprisingly, Cobbett in April 1830 complained that the ‘one deficiency’ of
figure 20 Typical nineteenth-century hedge, planted with and still largely
composed of hawthorn, with sparse oak standards.