Hedges were first planted for economic reasons, only to be destroyed for other economic reasons

In the predominantly agricultural societies of the Middle Ages, trees were a source of wealth: Norbert Elias draws a parallel between prisoners killed and the trees, wells and fields destroyed to weaken the enemy. The hedgerow, along with the advent of boundaries, was an investment that helped define the limits of lucrative private property.

In his Théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs, Olivier de Serres (1539-1619), an agronomist before his time, celebrated hedges as better dividers than walls, ditches and palisades, because they of their impassability:

“Hedges are of great service every day, prohibiting the passing of people and beasts with their thorns, as one cannot pass through them nor climb atop of them.”

However, the hedge’s role in protecting crops, vines and gardens from damage by “beasts and thieves” is not inherent, but requires specific labour, for which Olivier de Serres furnishes valuable advice: choose hawthorn over brambles, add manure to the hedge to strengthen it, prune its shoots to stimulate growth, twist branches to leave no room for pests (including “poultry”) and trim the top of it every year. It is not enough to just plant a hedge: it has to be constantly “built up”.

“Build” a hedge? Since the 1980s, ethnologists of technology have studied the work that was still being carried out on hedges at the beginning of the 20th century and have highlighted the distinction between living and dead hedges, the latter having fallen into disuse. Composed of dead branches, dead hedges were easy to move but required regular maintenance to replace wood that had been eaten away by water, sunlight and insects. As for living hedgerows, composed of trees and shrubs, they were also “built up”, to use [ethnoecologist] Patrice Notteghem’s term. It is important to block up musses (gaps through which small animals might pass) in sections of dead hedges, but also to force the plants to grow horizontally. This is the aim of “pleaching” - that pre-barbed wire technique that transformed skilfully woven hedgerows into impenetrable barriers: “the dead hedge is like a living woven structure”. In current literature, the work of Christian Hongrois on this point is the most precise but, paradoxically, the most ignored. The ethnologist gives a detailed account of the nature of ploughing in the Vendée, supported by numerous drawings and photographs. As a sign of the times, his 1997 book, hitherto available in just one university library, has now been published in a new, expanded and updated edition.

If hedgerows can become an effective “enclosure” when properly managed, they are also a productive plant infrastructure. If we talk of building up rather than planting, we should also use the term ‘cultivation’ rather than ‘maintenance’. This is the case with pollarded trees, which are cut back in different ways and whose wood serves a variety of purposes. Frequent pruning points to a social relationship: according to a practice that was formalised in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before being abandoned in the 1950s trunks and the ‘noble’ wood were the property of the landowners, while small branches were left to the farmers. Today, farmers are concerned with maintaining hedgerows, not cultivating them. The naturalist's ideal, meanwhile, is to let them grow so that they can host a rich ecosystem. By contrast, for the late-19th-century farmer, hedgerows were first and foremost a crop to be harvested. Taking hawthorn as an example, Bernadette Lizet shows that this plant had “become so rare in the wild in an environment subject to intensive exploitation of all its resources that, in the recent past, it required the organisation of a costly expedition in order to obtain some”. She discovered that, in 1880, a group of villagers in the Ain region undertook a fifty-kilometre journey to the nursery in the neighbouring town in order to obtain the precious plant, which was then symbolic of modernity.

Wood from hedges was used for heating. The branches, once bundled, were used in bread ovens and to cook certain cheeses, for example. In addition, cooking was not limited to food for human consumption: feed for pigs, hens and other farmyard animals was also systematically cooked. Hedgerows were also sources of other resources. Ash leaves, for example, made delicious fodder for cows. Blackberries were an essential ingredient for jam and hazelnuts for oil, not to mention walnuts, medlars, sloes and chestnuts. Hardwoods were used for building construction and making tools such as brooms, yokes, cattle prods, frames, ladders, fences, stakes, etc. Writer Jean-Loup Trassard reports that hedges were also a source of children’s toys such as the canne‐pétouère, a kind of blowpipe made from a hollowed-out elder branch, and spinning tops. As for clematis and wicker, their supple branches provided raw material for ties used in “pleaching” hedges and making bundles, but also for basketry: panniers, beehives and furniture. Alice de Vinck reminds us that faggots were essential for firing pots. Christian Hongrois reports on the medical and traditional uses of plants: hawthorn against warts, elder against toothache, oak leaves against diarrhoea, etc.

Over the course of the 20^th century, the development of techniques and marketing channels gradually rendered obsolete the essential services that hedgerows provided to the domestic economy of rural households. Barbed wire, the “artificial bramble”, replaced woven hedges, while the advent of electric fencing sounded the death knell of the historic function of hedgerows as barricades. The arrival and widespread use of fossil fuels and electricity also saw the consumption of wood for household energy decline. Bread was no longer baked at home, but could be bought at the bakery, and kiln-fire pottery was replaced by manufactured utensils available in shops. Since baking bread and firing pottery were no longer necessary, the use of faggots disappeared. Sawmills and then DIY stores supplied handles, ladders, planks, joists and rafters obtained from trees, while the struggling wickerwork industry was supplanted by the rise of Formica. Improved fodder production meant that the leaves previously fed to livestock were neglected. The novelty of products sold in village grocery shop, then in local supermarkets, were more attractive than the prospect of time-consuming fruit and nut picking. Modern pharmacopoeia replaced traditional treatments, which became no more than a distant memory. Even the canne‐pétouère and spinning top bowed out to their plastic counterparts, which became very popular with children.

All things considered, hedgerows were planted and built for economic reasons, only to be abandoned and destroyed for other economic reasons. During a process of long-term transformation, economic models changed geographically, with longer marketing chains short-circuiting the territorial link between the hedge and the farmhouse. The loss of function of hedgerows can be seen as a consequence of the demotion of local autonomy in favour of greater material interdependence between urban and rural social groups. The economy has also undergone a transformation in its relationship with time: agricultural work is caught up in a spiral of mechanisation and rural exodus. The fewer hands there are to work in the fields, the more machines there are, and vice versa. The time devoted to hedgerow maintenance decreases as farms get larger, which increases the amount of hedgerow per farmer, even though wooded areas are shrinking.

We are now in a position to understand why Julien Gracq wrote in 1934 that wooded countryside was “once a rational form of land use”, “an archaic form of economic life” that “will die out through social transformation”. In light of the wide variety of products harvested, Patrice Notteghem writes that hedgerows were “a real agro-forestry system”, while Bernadette Lizet describes them as “intensive farming”:

“Overgrown and half-dead, today’s relict hedgerows still bear the signs of bygone methodical cultivation. They bear witness to a time of functional woodland, a period of hyper-domesticity of the environment and an extreme degree of control of “the wild”, in which careful hedgerow management went hand in hand with the other aspects of the agricultural system”.

Hedgerows as a crop have become obsolete because of fundamental changes in economic relationships. They have gone from resources to be exploited with a view to harvesting to features to be maintained that have fallen into disuse. Once a source of services and products for rural households, hedgerows have become costly in the economy of today's specialised farms. Recent research even estimates that maintaining one kilometre of hedges represents a yearly expense of €450. It is fair to ask why hedgerows, with all their riches, have not disappeared completely from the agricultural landscape. After all, it was almost a century ago that Julien Gracq predicted their demise. Here again, a look at the economics of farming is fruitful: if more hedges have not disappeared, it is probably because destroying them is also expensive. Clearing and grubbing requires significant financial and material resources, which is an investment that, in the long run, may not benefit the farmer's cash flow.

This observation should not lead to pessimism, but rather to questioning the trend in the social sciences to promote the agency of “non-humans”, i.e. their ability to interfere in the course of action. Isn't this agency proportional to the economic limits of certain social groups? When we consider the ups and downs of the economic life of hedgerows, it is clear that objects and things in general have not been ignored by the social sciences, as Bruno Latour claimed, but have been studied very closely by ethnologists of techniques, which focuses among other things on the economy of farms. Unfortunately, this anthropology of the environment was marginalised by Philippe Descola's anthropology of nature, which focuses more on representations than on practices. The economic history of hedgerows confirms the interest of this ethnological work, which has been overshadowed by other research traditions which, while important, cultivate a rhetoric of rupture that neglects the contribution of existing studies.