The Hedgerow in Spring

The lane near my parents' house had a blackthorn hedge that flowered before anyone paid attention. Small white blossoms open on bare branches while the mornings were still dark at seven. Most people walked past it.

That's the thing about a hedgerow in spring. It springs out of nowhere. 

Blackthorn first

Blackthorn blossom has a smell that's hard to place - faint and slightly almond-like. It flowers on bare wood, which gives it a skeletal quality up close: white petals against black thorns, no leaves to soften anything. It's beautiful in the way that early spring is a little brutal. 

The thorns are serious. Blackthorn was the hedging plant of choice for centuries precisely because livestock don't push through it twice. A deterrent to larger animals, but a haven to nesting birds. Those dense, thorny boundaries are why so many British fields still have their shape - and why the hedgerow, as a habitat, has held. 

Then hawthorn

By May the mood has changed entirely. Hawthorn (aka May blossom) comes in creamy white clusters and fills the lanes with a scent that is harder to describe because it isn't simply sweet like elderflower or honeysuckle, there’s a muskiness to it, something almost fermented - which is probably why it was considered unlucky to bring it indoors. The countryside smells like that in late spring and it's fine, even lovely, out in a field. Concentrated in a room though would be something else.

Elderflower

The elder is a scrappy tree. It grows fast, it grows anywhere, it's not particularly beautiful, and then in June it produces those wide, flat flower heads and everything is forgiven.

The scent of elderflower is the one I find hardest to be rational about. It's sweet without being cloying, floral without being perfume-y, and it has a quality of place that very few things manage - it smells like a specific kind of English afternoon, the kind that involves a garden and some shade and the feeling that there is nowhere else you need to be. It's in bloom for about three weeks. Every year the window closes before you're ready for it to.

Our Elderflower & Honeysuckle candle started with that problem - how do you hold onto something that's brief. So it’s paired with honeysuckle, which lingers longer and sits warmer, and between the two of them they map the hedgerow from late spring into early summer.

Honeysuckle at dusk

Honeysuckle doesn't give its best in the afternoon. The scent builds as the light fades - it's moth-pollinated, so the timing makes sense, but knowing why doesn't make the experience less strange. Walking past a hedgerow at dusk in June and catching that warm, heavy sweetness feels like the countryside turning a different face toward you.

It twines through whatever it can find - hawthorn branches, old fence posts, itself - and the flowers come in cream and pale yellow and occasionally a deeper pink, depending on the variety. It is not, if we're being honest, a tidy plant. But the hedgerow isn't a tidy place, and that's rather the point.

On hedgerows generally

Britain's hedgerows are one of the more extraordinary things about our landscape, if you stop to think about what they are - networks of semi-wild habitat threaded through farmland, often several hundred years old, supporting hundreds of species while also marking the boundaries of fields that have barely changed. They are infrastructure and wilderness at the same time.

A lot of them were lost in the second half of the twentieth century. What's left is worth knowing about.

Explore our Hedgerow collection, candles rooted in the scents of the British countryside, or join Notes from the Hedgerow, our seasonal letter, if you'd like more of this delivered to your inbox.