Most of us walk past a hedgerow without really looking at it. It’s the green blur at the edge of a field, the boundary you drive alongside, the thing that separates one path from another. And then, some ordinary afternoon in July, you actually stop, and it turns out to be doing an enormous amount of quiet work.
Right now, ours is thick with foxglove spires leaning slightly under their own weight, dog rose scrambling up through the hawthorn as if it’s trying to get somewhere, and honeysuckle that you don’t so much see as smell, usually just as the light starts to go gold in the evening. A robin has been keeping half an eye on us the whole time (hedgerow robins always seem to know exactly how close they can get away with coming). Somewhere lower down, out of sight, there’s the unhurried business of a snail going about its day at a pace that makes the rest of ours look faintly ridiculous.
None of this is rare or remarkable. That’s rather the point. A hedgerow isn’t a destination, nobody plans a day out around one, which might be exactly why it rewards the kind of looking that isn’t trying to find anything in particular. You just notice what’s there. A wren doing something busy and self-important in the base of it. Rosehips starting to blush before anyone else has thought about autumn. The particular way light comes through hawthorn leaves in the last hour of the day.
It’s the sort of noticing that’s easy to lose the habit of, and easy to get back, you just have to slow down enough to let the hedge do what it’s already doing. Which, if you think about it, is a decent description of what we’re always trying to bottle up in a Gentle Library pack: not an activity exactly, just permission to stop and look properly at something ordinary.
That’s really where the Hedgerow theme came from, not a design brief, just a lot of standing in front of hedges this year, working out which of its residents deserved to be on the guest list. The robin, the stoat and the hedgehog ended up as the welcoming committee, gathered together in one small scene, because between the three of them they cover most of what a hedgerow actually feels like: watchful, a little shy, quietly busy. There’s a fingerprint tree in the pack too, an oak growing up out of a hedgerow base, which has turned out to be a lovely one for a shower, since it leaves every guest a small mark on something that’s meant to be kept rather than thrown away at the end of the afternoon.
If any of that sounds like your kind of gathering, the Hedgerow Baby Shower Pack is up on the site now, Essential and Complete tiers both, everything from invitations through to the games and activity stations, all in the same gentle, watercolour hedgerow world.
Either way,next time you’re walking past one, it might be worth the thirty seconds it takes to actually look.
by Sarah
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