Last spring, I held a funeral for a hedge. It was a cobbled-together ceremony for us to share our grief for the ‘singing hedge’ that had been cared for by our late neighbour for decades.
The previous April, having failed to save the hedge, we watched as the digger wrenched it out and destroyed the complex assembly of organisms that separated our front garden from next door. We watched sparrows do U-turns in mid-air.
We asked to adopt the remains. Once the landscapers had dumped the severed limbs on our drive, my partner carried the pile to the back garden, saving pieces that still bore roots.
In the days that followed, I moved between this solemn stack of matter in the back garden and the silence in the front garden. I sat with my sadness and started to think about what and who hedges are.
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The hedge was privet and forsythia, bramble and ivy, but it was also a glorious bundle of nooks offering cover, shelter, shade and food. It offered space for spiders to build webs, insects to lay eggs and microbes to populate. Its leaves were sunning spots for bees and playthings for the breeze. We could only speculate at its invisible underground connections, created over decades.
The hedge worked for us humans, too: it cooled our space, made its own mulch and had its own acoustics from the birds’ chatter. The hedge flowered and fruited and gave scents and berries. It slowed the rain and sifted particulates and pollution. It softened street sounds, gave us greens for our eyes and plugged us in to the planetary calendar.
The particular distress we felt at this destruction was hard to articulate. In response to the paucity of words in English that help us speak and think about our relationship with the wild world, philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia: the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home, “when your endemic sense of place is being violated”.
It hints at the layering of the community we are all part of that goes beyond the people we live around, to the plants, bees, trees, rivers, verges, birds, beetles, moths, butterflies and others that make up our communities too. It points towards a language of personhood for the living world; a growing movement across the globe.
The ruin of the hedge came on top of numerous losses on my daily walks. I felt each action of ecological harm more acutely than the last; a cumulative grief of hyperlocal, national and global degradation of the land, from the removal of plants in pavement cracks to carpets of astroturf.
Once you start considering the lives of the more-than-human world around you, it’s hard to unsee or un-feel it. I had stumbled into Aldo Leopold’s ‘world of wounds’, the result of a growing ecological awareness.
I wondered how to mark these bereavements – because that’s what they had become. I needed a way to process the grief I was feeling, but also to offer some action or ritual to mark the passing of such a complex and generous life.
I played with the idea of ‘hedge fund managers’ – that the creatures in a healthy hedge are collectively managing this ecological niche, with gains and losses that mirror markets.
For the funeral, a group of us burned incense, shared words, stitched ‘hedge fund manager’ rosettes depicting birds and berries, and ate together. In sombre suits we walked with the hedge remains in a wheelbarrow through Saturday shoppers to join the Funeral For Nature, organised by the Red Rebel Brigade and Extinction Rebellion in the centre of Bath.
Philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia: the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home
The hedge was replaced with an acoustically sterile, structurally bland and materially dubious fence. It felt like a full stop. But sharing this story has been the opposite: it has cultivated a connection with others who feel such losses acutely. We planted the bit of hedge that survived, chipped some and gave it to people to scatter – part votive, part inoculation. I took armfuls of hedge to events and workshops.
Crucially, the singing hedge has helped me consider who a garden is and who gardens are for, who we cultivate our spaces with and where our gardens begin. The hedge was wood and leaf and sparrow.
Plants are just the start – it’s all the other creatures that really make our spaces sing. It feels mundane, this decline on our doorsteps, but the small acts of destruction contribute leaf by leaf to the stone-hard silence of the places we live in. Isn’t such complexity and generosity worth mourning, honouring and fighting for?
Claire Loder is an artist, community grower, writer and academic based in Bath.
