A fortnight of notes from the hedge behind the car park

There is a hedge behind the supermarket car park that nobody planted and nobody tends. It is about forty paces long and exactly as wide as the gap the builders left when they could not be bothered to square off the corner. I have taken to writing down what it does. Here is a fortnight of it.

The first morning, a wren worked the whole length of it at ankle height, never once breaking cover, the way a wren will treat six feet of bramble as a continent.

A trolley has been abandoned in the ditch at the far end for long enough that bindweed has climbed the handle and a blackbird now uses the top rail as a lookout. The trolley is doing more for the wildlife than the ornamental planting at the front of the shop, which is watered by a timer and visited by nothing.

On the fourth day the haws came good, that deep wet red, and within an hour of my noticing it a group of redwings noticed it too. They are winter birds. Their arrival is the first honest news of the season, earlier and more reliable than any calendar.

Somebody emptied a coffee into the base of the hedge every morning for a week. By the end of it there was a slick little path worn to the one gap you can slip through, and I realised it was a shortcut to the bus stop, and that I was not the only one using the hedge for my own quiet reasons.

Spiders after the first cold night. Not the spiders themselves, but their evidence, every strand of the thing hung with fog so that for twenty minutes the whole hedge looked structural, engineered, and then the sun came up a finger's width and it was just a hedge again.

A fox has a route through here. I have never seen it. I know it the way you know a housemate you work opposite shifts to, by the flattened grass, the scat on the kerb, the particular silence of the birds at the hour it must pass.

I write these things down because the counting is the point. Any single morning tells you nothing. It is only when you have a fortnight of mornings, then a year, then five, that the notes begin to mean something, that you can say with any honesty whether the redwings are later than they used to be or the wren is still holding its continent. A hedge behind a car park is not wilderness and I am not going to pretend it is. It is better than that. It is the proof that the wild does not wait for our permission or our postcard scenery. It just needs a corner we forgot to tidy.

Scruffy strips of green matter more than they look, and Nobody Mows Here makes the case for the roadside meadow, and for cutting a little less.