In the lead-up to the Highgrove competition, I speak to the man who taught the Prince of Wales how to lay hedges, Roger Parris, a 78-year-old dairy farmer and expert hedgelayer from Devon. I catch him between trips to visit his herd; his broad West Country accent is like a blast of Exmoor air down the line. ‘I first hedged here on the farm with my father when I was 10, in 1953, learning the skills. I’ve never stopped. I’m still hedgelaying now,’ he tells me.

Over that period, Parris has witnessed first-hand the devastation of our hedgerows. ‘With modern machinery now, you can’t get the machine into a two-acre field to operate. Some of the big farms have 100-, 200-acre fields. Now, they could run a hedge across them and halve them and it would make a huge difference.’

This is a message I hear repeatedly from the hedgelayers I speak to: that restoring hedges to our rural landscape is a fairly simple act, but one that would have dramatic consequences both for our wildlife and the climate, not to mention the part hedges play in mitigating flood risk.

As one of those who help organise the Highgrove competition, Parris is acutely aware of the succession crisis in hedgelaying. ‘You’ve got to train young people,’ he says. 

‘Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we’ve been unable to do training anywhere in the country for the past few years, so we’ve got very few young people coming through at the moment.’ It’s not all doom and gloom, though – he points out that eight young Welsh cutters will be coming to the competition, where they will be taught by a group of professional Welsh hedgelayers.

Among the younger generation of layers is John Exton, a 33-year-old hedgelayer from Melton Mowbray. We speak in the evening – it’s the beginning of the hedgelaying season and Exton has been out working all day. He tells me that he was studying land management at college when a tutor invited him on a hedgelaying trip. 

He never looked back – but recognises that a life of hard and poorly paid work outside in the elements is not everyone’s idea of fun. ‘It’s a dying art,’ he tells me. ‘Not many people want to do it for a living. Even if you can persuade them to do a course in hedgelaying, when they see what hard work it is, they don’t want to carry it on. 

It’s all I do all winter. I help out on the family farm and do a bit of gardening, but hedgelaying is what I do seven days a week in winter. If I got the chance, I would even do it on Christmas Day.’

There’s no disguising the fact that the process of hedgelaying can look brutal to the layperson. An act that is profoundly necessary in order to prolong the life of the hedge may initially appear like an act of vandalism. 

‘A friend of mine has had people handcuff themselves to the hedge [as he was laying it],’ Exton tells me. ‘He had to get the police involved to get them off the hedge. They just wouldn’t believe he was saving it, not destroying it.’

Exton’s love of hedgelaying comes from the beauty of the landscapes in which he works, but also the closeness of the hedgelaying community. ‘I really do love it,’ he says. ‘Every hedge is a challenge and I love that challenge. With the competitions, with Prince Charles’s event in particular, it’s a social event and I’ve met people from across the country, and they’re really close friends now.’