Our half-acre lot is a rectangle, with our house running perpendicular to the wide side, with a quarter of the lot being front yard, and the rest being back yard. And in the backyard, where it can harm no one, is a large hackberry tree.
Or perhaps more accurately, was a hackberry tree. It’s now actively dying, and has been since the great drought of 2024. It has died from the top down, so that even today the lowest branches leafed out this year, while the topmost limbs have been decaying and falling for a few years now.
It isn’t near anyone’s house or other structures, so we have been content to let it continue to die a natural death. This is best for the other creatures that live on our property – bugs move in, followed by woodpeckers, followed by cavity dwellers. We have arranged native vines to run up the tree trunk, so it also provides food and cover for birds and flowers and green foliage in the summer and autumn color for us.
But it is messy. After every rainfall, there are dead limbs beneath it that no longer had the strength to hang on. What, exactly, is one to do with this debris? It’s a huge tree, so we are not just talking about 1 or 2 limbs.
There are many things one could do, I guess. I could have cut them into pieces and taken them to the dump, or burned them in my backyard fire pit, or made hügelkultur garden beds. But instead of any of that, I made a dead hedge.
A dead hedge is simple a decorative brush pile. Now, people from the UK, where they are so ahead of us on wildlife gardening, would fight me over that statement, but that is really what it is. A google image search of dead hedges brings up a wild amount of variation, but the concept is simple: Use tree debris like prunings and dead wood to create piles where wildlife can hide, where compost can happen naturally, and they are out of the way of humans.
Brush piles in and of themselves are amazing for wildlife. They provide cover for small mammals and birds, they provide food and cover for bugs and amphibians and reptiles, and they provide structure for other plants to grow on and through. But they tend to be seen as ugly by humans. Or, at least, 21st Century humans living in suburban neighborhoods in the USA. Other cultures have long since learned how to manage this.
So as the limbs fell from the hackberry, I laid them along an imaginary line, somewhat crenellating, across my back yard, some 30 feet in front of my rear boundary. It is now almost fifty feet long, some four feet wide, and about four feet high. As I have trimmed other shrubs and trees, I have woven their supple limbs in and out of the bigger, dead ones, and we have allowed the native crossvines and pepper vines to grow rampant , so in the summer portions of it are invisible. A few seedling cherry laurels have come up in it, gifts from the birds who roost there. We have left the cherry laurels, and so now the dead hedge is becoming the foundation of a hedgerow. It is one of the most alive places on our property, filled with lizards and birds, and bugs and the snakes that eat them.
Over time, it will change, as the smaller limbs break down and the bigger limbs shift. It also changes as I add new limbs as they fall, and the leavings when I prune the other bushes and trees. It’s an everchanging organic sculpture.
But it is also more than that.
Between the dead hedge and my back fence I have planted wax myrtles, black cherry, and yaupons, and the birds have planted the cherry laurels and some black cherry and elderberry of their own. There are four pine trees in this strip as well, dropping their pine straw obligingly on the ground to serve as mulch.
This is on the eastern side of our yard, and so there is one side of the base of the dead hedge that only gets morning sunlight, while the other side bakes in the sun all afternoon. We are content to let this 30 by 100 foot strip be woodland, but managed, with a path that weaves among the saplings, which I limb up from time to time to make it more navigable. In the mornings I like to walk this path, and hear the birdsong and see the skinks and the anoles, and hear the brush rattle as some small mammal runs to hide from my intrusion into their home.
When we moved in, this rear boundary was a typical privacy fence against lawn grass, barring the four pine trees and the one hackberry. But now, eight years later, it’s habitat.