What if I said there was a hedgerow in your house? Okay, there’s not, but it’s likely that you are familiar with the aesthetics born of longstanding cultural interactions with hedgerows and coppice lots. Hedgerows are not boxy rows of squared off shrubbery; those victims of suburban plant harassment are just plain ol’ hedges.
This newly laid hedgerow will be a scruffy abundance in a decade.
Hedgerows are a line (or two) of trees that have been cut not-quite through while young and then bent over, and woven into / tied to their neighbors, a process known as “laying”. The trees re-sprout, forming a dense network of branches.
Laying a hedgerow is hardly speedy work. The farmers would spend the winter working on stretches of their fenceline (hedgerow) but would never have gotten to even a 10th of the farm’s hedgerows in a single winter. After 10-20 years, the hedgerow trees have fully recovered and the fence is quite tall and vigorous but perhaps not as tight as it used to be. By now the farmer has worked their way around to the starting spot and down goes the hedgerow again.
This is part that garners the most attention, this living line. It’s what’s cut off, though, that wound up in your kitchen. Known as “small wood”, what comes off a hedgerow is typically long, thin, straight, and rarely more than a few inches in diameter.
Chairs, banisters, balustrades, table legs and braces: all small wood crafts.
Think of all the spindle backed chairs, all the banisters and balusters, the tool handles, window mullions, wooden spoons, wicker furniture… Actually, I’m not sure about the wicker, but you get the idea. Hedgerows begat a whole economy and culture.
Why were the effects so pervasive? Because the hedgerows themselves were so pervasive, and so very much not controlled by any large organized entity. Small wood based craft houses formed a cottage industry, each acquiring from the farmers the lengths and diameters suited to their particular creations, from picket fences to chair backs to axe handles. From these craft houses, the hedgerows filtered out and into our homes.
We’ve largely lost the thatched roofs and the technique of bundling very similar diameter sticks into “logs” to produce an even burning cooking fire suitable for baking bread. Even so, a lot of what Western civilization considers “normal” is influenced by these hedgerows and their brethren, the coppice lots.
As the snow melts, the soil warms.
As the grazing animals (like 
First morning of spring! I look out the window and … SNOW! Oh my. Time to breathe deep and remember how much I like maple syrup. And butterflies. And wild flowers. Okay, that worked: I have 
When wind power was getting up and running, there was a lot of angst about the number of birds being knocked out the sky by the spinning arms. That turned out to be a gearing issue- just spin the blades at a different speed. But even had it been an unsolvable conundrum, would that have been justification for halting wind turbines? Don’t oil and coal and natural gas kill more birds by far?
