This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Just about every book on nature written in the last 20 years or so has at some stage alluded to that celebrated John Muir quote that runs: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” In those 19 words are cradled many truths, two of which are that, in nature, everything is connected, and nothing is simple.
Richard Negus’ wonderful new book Words from the Hedge is an important, funny and passionate defence of the British countryside. The hedge is merely the principal actor in a cast of many hundreds, the particular vantage point from which Negus observes the unfolding drama around him.
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For Negus, the hedge is the artery through which the wildlife is pumped, the mark by which the health of the land can be judged and, to be fair, the indirect provider of his monthly wage. He sees the decline of the hedge since the Second World War not as some cataclysmic betrayal of an old inheritance but rather as another chapter in the ebb and flow and ebb of the hedge as a part of the British countryside. Throughout, he makes the points that there is no one solution for “a good hedge” and that a bad hedge is often worse than no hedge at all.
Gilbert White used to talk about “watching narrowly”, believing that it was only by close and consistent observation that he could understand the world about him. I rather suspect that he would approve of Negus, who fills this book with beautifully described encounters with the birds, insects, mammals and plants that are often as close as he will get to having co-workers. This, he says, is “an essential state of mind for the hedgelayer”. The key to the success of these passages is that they are never sentimentalised but rather offered as privileged but routine vignettes of his world. Similarly, the key to the power of the overall book is that it doesn’t get bogged down in soft-focus, time-honoured rural custom. “I don’t have time,” he says, “to dwell in tradition for the sake of tradition.”
At the heart of the book, which is written with a strong sense of Negus’ East Anglia homeland, lies a plea for us to understand the importance of the rural craftsmanship to the future of our ultra-modern digital world. It might be exemplified by his business partner, Gouldy, spotting a small tunnel in the grass as belonging to a doe rat who will go on, if not checked, to consume the very wildlife they are working to protect; or it might be that of Silent Jim, the deer stalker; or Michael Dixon, who taught him his craft; or any one of a host of farmers, gamekeepers and other countrymen whose hard-earned practicality keeps the rural show on the road. It is mainly men who feature in the book, not, I suspect, because the author wants it that way but because that is the reality of how the cookie has crumbled in these hardscrabble workplaces.
I hope that this becomes an audiobook, not least because I think the listener would be conscious of a generous smile at the heart of the narrative, a light chuckle wanting to run free. This is important; there are far too many miserable nature books that are driving the rookie reader into early despair. Negus does have a chapter on “Enemies”, and he sees many obstacles to nature regeneration, from cheap food to the Rural Payments Agency and beyond. What is refreshingly different about his treatment of them, though, is he can distinguish individuals from their organisation, and he allocates praise where praise is due. Two of his most fulsome appreciations are reserved for one particular DEFRA civil servant and two RSPB fieldworkers, despite the fact that the RSPB and DEFRA are two organisations that definitely do not meet his approval.
Negus is fair, which many writers are not. Ridiculously, British nature is beset with fights it can’t afford, and Negus needs to be applauded for treading gently and thoughtfully within them. Even when I found myself mildly disagreeing with him, on rewilding and the usefulness of ecologists, his words made me smile.
What we have in Words from the Hedge is a manifesto for a robust countryside that puts practical excellence ahead of theoretical posturing, and it is long overdue. If a better book on the working British landscape is written this year, or this decade for that matter, we are fortunate indeed.
