An effort to seed a revival of hedgerows in Dublin city

On Monday, on the campus of University College Dublin (UCD), Sophie von Maltzan points to a patch of tall grass and other plants between the UCD athletics track and a car park.

“See that? That's a baby horse chestnut tree. Say, loads of baby horse chestnut trees,” says von Maltzan, a landscape architect and a design fellow at UCD. 

There’s ragwort, daisies, hazel trees, hawthorn, and more in this young urban hedgerow. 

Some of these plants, she seeded. Some are there because this patch of campus isn’t being mowed.

“The Earth never stays. There's always seeds arriving,” she says.  “Look how pretty it looks, no?”

There’s a ribbon of plastic on little poles fencing it off so the landscapers know not to cut it down again – to let it grow up big and strong.

“We’ll be adding more edible shrubs or any sort of fruit bush,” von Maltzan says. “Blackberry, gooseberry.” 

In the autumn, she’ll bring her students out here to do weeding, she says. “Once you're 20 people, you're pretty quick to do it.”

Von Maltzan is working on planting more hedgerows – native trees, shrubs and grasses, like those found along rural roads and fields – in Dublin’s urban spaces, adding to the roughly 20km that already exists.

So far, she’s planted some around UCD, and in a couple of neighboring housing estates. The goal is to go further, across the city – and beyond.

Inspiration

Von Maltzan says she got the idea for this project after reading a piece in the Irish Field, and a farmer’s letter in reply. 

“‘Why is it that I have to plant hedgerows that look messy,’” she paraphrased the farmer, “‘and then I come into town and they’re allowed to have clipped hedges, mown lawns, and spray as much as they want?’” 

“That totally inspired me,” von Maltzan says. Wouldn’t it be great to have more “messy” hedgerows across urban areas as well? she thought. 

“If people started admiring the beauty of hedgerows in cities, then rural people would be proud of them, instead of trying to copy, you know, the neat laurel hedge that city people have because they want to look tidy," she said.

She’s experimenting at this point: what grows well here, what people like. Foraging is trendy, she said, and she’s testing fruit and herb hedges. 

“We're going to develop different urban trial hedgerows,” she says. “The edible hedgerow, and the not-so-fast-growing hedgerow, and the thorn-free hedge. Even for people with small gardens, and children.”

Mark McDowell of Hedgerows Ireland, said he thinks it’s a great idea, and that he’s pleased to see she managed to plant some on UCD’s campus in Belfield.

“I'm really glad she succeeded. Ten years ago, I was trying to get to plant hedges out in Belfield,” McDowell said later on the phone. “I got nowhere, nowhere with them at all.” 

When she heard that comment on the campus later, Maltzan pointed at patchy grass as she walks. To be fair– “we just guerrilla planted this,” she says. But other patches, yes UCD funded, she says.

A repository of wildlife

“[Hedgerows] are probably the repository of most of our wildlife in Ireland,” said Marcus Collier, an associate professor of botany at Trinity College Dublin. 

Especially pollinators, he says.

Dublin has biodiversity importance for the island, because in cities, people plant all kinds of species, and their seeds spread, he says. “Whereas in rural areas, it’s a farm. A farm is a factory.”

EPA research has shown hedgerows support birds, insects, and small mammals, and can even reduce air pollution when planted along roads.

McDowell, of Hedgerows Ireland, said they can dramatically improve urban landscapes. 

“If you have a factory of any description, and they have all sorts of security, and this is likely to be either concrete walls or metal railings with spikes on the top, all of that can be made even more secure, but completely transformed if you plant a hedge along it and look after it,” he said. “It has suddenly become a lovely place to walk and a lovely place to work.”

“They soften moods,” he said. “The scientific facts of that are that you do feel better. There’s nothing imaginary about it.”

Von Maltzan also sees hedgerows as cultural infrastructure – a way to celebrate rural heritage. 

But there are often objections to them. 

A hedgerow will be a bit untidy looking, says biodiversity planner Mary Tubridy. “It will collect rubbish,” she says. “So there is a kind of bias against doing something like that in an urban area.”

McDowell recalled a “terrible experience”, when one woman had a hedge at the foot of the Dublin Mountains, full of life, bees, bats, and hedgehogs. 

But her neighbors called it a haven for vermin and got the council to remove it. “It can be very misunderstood,” he said.

Scaling up?

Tubridy, who’s helped design the city’s biodiversity plans, said von Maltzan isn’t the only one working on this kind of thing-- people like McDowell at Hedgerows Ireland, and Irish Wildlife Trust. 

And she said really, at UCD, it’s just restoring what was lost. “Because the original site would have had a great network of hedgerows, right?” Tubridy said. 

She said that’s how it was when she worked at UCD in the ’80s, ’90s, before it added more car parks and buildings. Restoring that habitat, she said, is “very appropriate and very important”.

So far, von Maltzan said she’s done what she’s done with €3,000 from UCD, student labour, and free plants from the Green Economy Foundation's Trees on the Land project.

So she’s thinking about how to grow this. She thinks incentives, like paying homeowners, could help. 

Collier, the botanist at Trinity, said he thinks public funding is possible. “If we’re going to announce €200 billion of infrastructure in the country, we should be thinking of our hedgerows and field boundaries as part of that infrastructure,” he said. 

“It would be a tiny, tiny blip,” he said.

Trinity’s campus next?

Von Maltzan wants to do more sample hedgerows around the city, she says. 

She was thinking, for example, of Trinity College Dublin’s campus, because they are continuously adapting their planting scheme to increase biodiversity. 

Could it happen on Trinity’s city centre campus? Collier, who works there, said yes – but there are limitations. 

First of all, “The demand for space is very, very high,” he said. “We’re at a critical level.”

And he said, they like their trimmed lawns. “We can’t put hedgerows in the middle of the square. Because it’ll impact the architectural look.”

“The difficulty is, it's just fitting the right wild space into the tight cement spaces of cities,” said Collier. That's where people like Sophie's design mind comes in.”

Collier brainstormed some potential spots around Trinity: at the front entrance, or replacing the single-species hedge by the rugby pitch. 

Even deconstructed hedgerows: trees, then scrub, then grass. He said that could work.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.