onionbagblog

Good news – re-growth has begun on the hedgerows that the Environment Agency so brutally vandalised back at the start of the year.

You may remember how the excuse of protecting the sea wall from burrowing rabbits (nope – me neither) was put up as the justification for the savage destruction of our beautiful local walkways. Strange then that the diggers left in place the roots of the rosehips, blackberry and hawthorn bushes.

Unlike the Environment Agency, Mother Nature has all the answers when it comes to the natural way of protecting our environmental heritage. A Mediterranean month of April in Wivenhoe (steady) and the first signs are starting to show of re-growth along the walkway past the Sailing Club and out towards the Creek.

Even the manufactured marshland – the mess made by the digger’s caterpillar tyres – is starting to heal. No sign of re-growth here, but at least the mud has hardened and looks slightly more pleasant on the eye.

Heading back in the opposite direction towards the Hythe, and it is a similar celebratory spring story along the Wivenhoe Trail. The Environment Agency decided to butcher the bushes all the way down to the University Quays accommodation, leaving a very exposed and bleak landscape.

Now I’m not great identifier of all that is good and green (um, it’s grass, isn’t it?) but some rather charming weeds with white flowers are now lining either side of the Trail out of the wooded area, three, four deep, greeting you as though you are Royalty as you cycle along.

Which is some ways, Comrades, we all are, of course.

The next challenge is to make sure that the Environment Agency isn’t given the opportunity to devastate our landscape with such ease ever again. A formal letter of warning (and it was a bloody warning) was sent to Wivenhoe Town Council last August, ahead of the vandalism.

This was slept on, with the diggers surprising councillors, and locals, with the unannounced speed of the devastation some six months later. I like to think that having seen the reaction to the folly of this mass enforced policy, Wivenhoe won’t give the diggers such an easy ride, should they return around these parts once again.

Now then – keep it a secret, but *shhh* – I’ve found a supply of hawthorns that should be ripe with rosehips in six months time. Don’t tell the Environment Agency; do tell however those nice folk from Transition Town Wivenhoe who are putting together a Free Fruit Map of the area.

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