If you have never seen a skaapsteeker (initially mistaken night adder), here it is displayed by our smiling Wednesday worker, Austen. It was probably killed by a ferel cat but we made very sure before picking it up. Snakes have a tendency to ‘come back from the dead’ The markings are similar to that of the puffie but the slim head tells us it could be another kind of adder.
I’m also attaching a very interesting e-mail about hedges for garden entrepeneurs. It came after some excellent drawings form my artist friend in England. … regards, Jill
These twisted and gnarled hedges that I`m drawing at the moment are very, very old…. and the method in winter is to cut a branch halfway through so that it`s actually “hanging” on a small bit of it`s bark, then push the branch down so that to lies parallel to the ground within the hedge.
You do this to all the branches, then in Spring the hedge will produce huge masses of new growth in the cut place, as well as sending up lots of new shoots all along the length of the parallel branch.
This creates a thicker hedge as well.
But the wonderful thing about this method is that the hedge is then given a new lease on life, and instead of simply getting thinner and thinner each year from cutting it at the top, it now has an extension on it`s life…. and hedge that is “layered” (as it`s called) like this, will live for up to 300 years or more!And another bonus to this method, is that wherever these branches that are pushed down, touch another branch, they grow together (fuse) so that you end us with incredibly beautifull or bizarre shapes within the hedge.
But you have to layer the hedge every number of years otherwise it will just bolt upwards.
In the old days when farms had a lot of labourers on the farms, there were always people working on the hedges every winter. But nowadays no one seems to bother to keep up this layering tradition, and many of the ancient hedges are dying and rotting away…. they send up tall shoots, which then becaome thick and tree-like and these catch the wind, and because the base is so old, the whole thing gets blown over and dies.So I`m trying to capture and record some of the layered hedges around this area, in drawings.
These layered hedges were usually used as definite land boundaries 300+ years ago, and so it is possible to see the layout of ancient farms by following these hedges.
You are not allowed to remove then or cut them down, by law, but there is no law against neglect, unfortunately.The whole of the UK is criss-crossed by thousands upon thousands of miles of ancient hedges like this, and they all tell a story about the area, and the farmsteads from yesteryear. I just love them.
