Bettering one’s hedges abroad

He mentions this in between some walling at the RHS’s Harlow Carr gardens at Harrogate and the fact he has a rather more modest home shoot near Ripon. “I put down 100 birds this year”. Shooting started last weekend.

We are drinking coffee at £2.95 a shot in Bettys at Harlow Carr where his wife Nikki is the gardens manager. Dan was just back from a four-week contract for Count Riprand Arzo-Zinneberg at his 12,000 hectare sporting estate at Vysoky Chlumec. Yes, strange names to me too. The count deals in real estate in the US and various other countries and his family lattice is a Who’s Who in European royalty. The family seat is near Munich but the Czech castle is most impressive, almost a fairy tale vision, with towering white walls and red roofs.

“It’s a beautiful area”, reports Dan, who was “found” for the count’s hedge-laying by another Yorkshireman, Robin Glaister. Robin, who has keepered at Dallowgill, is now head keeper for the count.

The surprise phone call came last May. He was needed to start “laying” four kilometres (2.5 miles) of hedge, planted to provide food for birds and wildlife and to make driven partridges and pheasants take off, rather than scuttle along the ground, before being shot at.

Dan worked almost non-stop and laid 700 metres (with a break to fly home for his grandmother’s 100th birthday.) “That was pretty good going, even if I say it myself”, says Dan, who has a re-shaped joint on his left thumb after sticking it with a thorn. His other memories are drinking the strong dark beer from the local brewery in a smoke-filled local bar – well, there is no TV in his flat in the estate office – and carp fishing in the estate lakes.

Dan is going back in early spring with 2,000 whips (young trees) of hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel which he will buy from Thorpe Trees, near Knaresborough. It will make 500 metres of hedge. He envisages a twice yearly routine to plant in spring and lay and tidy up the hedges in autumn.

Hedges can be laid in any month with an R – roughly coinciding with the sap’s dormant time.

He chose early autumn for the estate work to beat the harsh Czech winters which set in early and are more severe than the usual English white-over. This way, he can easily tell whether the trees have survived when the spring growing season starts.

When he is not walling, landscaping or managing hedges, Dan is likely to be found with a fishing rod or a shotgun. As well as his own shoot he is in a private shoot near Pateley Bridge and also adores fly fishing, with an imminent visit to the Tweed for salmon and trout, plus regular sea fishing on the east coast.

“I’d fish in a muddy puddle – anything that keeps me outdoors”, says 41-year-old Dan, whose career began as a 16-year-old leaver with a scant trawl of honours from Harrogate Grammar School.

A grandfather had been in the Cheshire corn trade, supplying feed for horses and Dan wanted to be a farrier. He failed to get the necessary five O-levels for the course – by how many he does not recall. Ah well, join the Army. Doing that he could transfer to the Veterinary Corps when he was 18, where he could farrier to his heart’s content. He started with the Royal Signal Corps at Catterick and never left, seeing service in the familiar hot zones and stayed for 10 years. The ambition to get personal with horses’ feet had gone and he was in civilian telecoms and IT for eight years. Nice job? “I hated it with a passion.”

Nikki bought him a course in hedge-laying at Craven College in Skipton as a present. Romance has many paths and this one provided a new life. He followed it with a walling course and today runs www.wrightconservation.co.uk and has a sweat shirt to prove it. He also has a half-share in a log supply business, thus enjoying a seasonal pattern of planting, walling, hedge laying and landscaping.

He says that after being taught the basic techniques for laying a hedge and mortar-free walling, the rest is learned through doing it. With hedges, you half-cut the uprights near their base, bend and weave into a living barrier. His rates? Hedge laying from 20 metres a day at £175 plus expenses. Walling (three to four metres a day) at £45 a metre plus exes.

Today is the annual Yorkshire hedge-laying championship near Fountains Abbey. Dan will be shooting instead. He did enter the national championships in 2008 and won the gong for “best job on a bad length” – full of innuendo, he muses.

Soon, though, he’ll be anticipating driven pheasants with the count. Just who else will be there is not known but Prince Michael of Kent has been on the count’s guest list. Security is tight.

Dan Wright teaches an RHS hedge laying course at Harlow Carr on November 12 (01423 565418).