Hedgerow Heroes:
Call for hedge sites 2025/26!

Thank you to everyone who has applied for a hedgerow this season. Applications are now closed for this year. We hope to run again in 2026/27 so do contact us if you have a suitable hedgerow site and we may be able to help next year.

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Hedge creation on farms, smallholdings and community sites

 

Are you a landowner wanting a new native-species hedgerow on your land this winter?

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CPRE Shropshire's Hedgerow Heroes project can provide free native whips, canes/guards (if required) and volunteer planters to come and do the work. We bring all our own tools. 

The volunteers are guided by an experienced volunteer lead. Many of our volunteers are also experienced planters.

 

We are keen to plant hedgerows on working farms and smallholdings.

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This is the fifth year of the Hedgerow Project in Shropshire.

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​Please get in touch as soon as possible if you are interested so we can arrange to visit the site in September 2025.

 

We do have criteria and boundaries:

 

• We cannot fund or provide fencing and the landowner would be responsible for this if it’s required

• We cannot plant on roadsides due to our PL insurance

• Sites must be safe for volunteers, ideally with parking nearby

• Ideally hedge sites should be visible from rights of way/roads/tracks/community areas (desirable, not essential)

• Hedges must connect up with other good habitat – meadows, grassland, ponds, woodland, copses, other hedges.

• We can also plant small copses were suitable

• We encourage the planting of hedgerow trees

• We are interested in sites where the landowner will manage the hedge sensitively going forward, so ideally letting up to lay/coppice or incremental trim regime and where possible letting hedgerow trees flourish.

 

The process/timeline is as follows:

 

• Call for sites (now/Aug/Sept)

• Farmers/landowners get in touch

• We send out a short questionnaire (or we can go over this on the phone – takes 5/10 mins). Fact gathering for us.

• If all’s well we send someone out on to site to meet with farmer and look at/assess site by end Sept

• We let the farmer know if successful or not by early-mid Oct

• Before the site is planted, we send a simple landowner agreement for the farmer to sign. We can provide sight of this in advance if necessary. It asks the landowner to look after the hedge to the best of their ability, gap up losses etc in future

• We come and plant between Dec and end Feb

  

Hedgerow Management Workshops

 

We will run 3 hedgerow management workshops for farmers. Two are already in the diary in south Shropshire for 28th and 29th October (10am to 2pm and they include a free light lunch).

 

We are seeking third site/venue in the Shrewsbury/Telford/North Shropshire area for the third workshop. We need a covered area for the morning session and access to power (for presentation/theory/talk), then easy access to a variety of hedges for a farm walk. Nigel Adams is the speaker/expert. He’s on the Hedgelink committee that advises Defra and is an accomplished hedgelayer himself. He helps farmers with hedgerow management plans. Ideally the farm site would have a variety of hedges to see from newly planted to recently laid, old laid, coppiced (recently/old), under managed, tightly managed etc. The more the merrier!

 

Farmers/land managers are very welcome to attend the workshops but must book first with admin@cpreshropshire.org.uk ​​​

 

(photo below: a hedgerow management workshop in progress near Chapel Lawn in 2023)

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