Leijpark013

@leijpark013 · 29 Sep 2023

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Leijpark 013 Hedge Knotweed

#park #hedgesandknotweed
Written by Thierry P. Dinjens ·

The Leijpark has a wide variety of plants, all of which have a unique way of survival. Among all these survivors, there are also so-called pendulum plants and one of them
we'll get to know you more closely today: the Hedge Knotweed.
Of course, we all know, against will and thanks, the all-destroying Japanese knotweed, but that is just one member of a large family that also includes our Hedge Knotweed. Unlike her Asian destructive nephew, she is a native plant that grows and winds up along (often prickly) hedges. We also call such garland plants' veils' because they drape over another plant like a veil and partly hide it from view. The plant grows only one year, but it can still reach a respectable height of two meters. For some reason, the stem of the Hedge Knotweed always wraps clockwise around the host plant. There may be a reason for that, but we still have many riddles to solve in our flora.
The Hedge Knotweed gives us a glimpse into our landscape from hundreds of years ago. Anyone who looks at our meadows now will especially see a lot of barbed wire. Barbed wire is installed once and people don't have to worry about it. In the past, however, people marked “their own meadow” with the construction of a hedge. Now we call such a hedge “labour-intensive in terms of maintenance”, but think back to earlier times. The farmers planted hedges along the banks of (large) rivers. The water brought fertile silt and after high tide, something always remained in the hedge; this fertilized the land. The hedge provided coppice for the manufacture of all kinds of tools and they used it to burn the fireplace. When the farmers incorporated blackthorn and hawthorn into the hedges, this also provided berries; a much-needed source of vitamin C.
The hedges with their spines acted as a courtship. The cows couldn't get through. So no one was able to steal the cattle and the animals couldn't fall into the water either. And the hedges formed clear boundaries, for other ranchers.
A nice bonus was that the hedges were also attractive for birds to nest in, for insects to take shelter and for amphibians to hibernate underneath, in the layer of leaf litter that formed in autumn. A hedge was therefore a breeding ground for life and the Hedge Knotweed lay over it like a veil. When hedges were banned, partly because hawthorns spread the fruit disease (pear fire) and had to be harvested to protect the pear harvest, some of the plants that were so dependent on these hedges and hedges also disappeared; including the Hedge Knotweed. It was a different time when people thought they were doing good. But where you do good on the left, you can certainly cause damage to the right.
The Leijpark, however, has no pear harvest, no barbed wire and no agricultural interests. There is only the free growth that matters. It is therefore here that we find the Hedge Knotweed. The plant that opens a window in time, where we see the bright red cattle grazing again along the defined waterfront, where the mockingbird nests in the old blackthorn hedge, where a soft sling plant hides part of our past, as it still does. We can't show you all the treasures of the Leijpark, but occasionally we can give you a glimpse.