Hedgerows and network models: nodes, edges and hedges

Last night I tuned into Professor Danielle Basset‘s Sante Fe Institute Community Lecture  called Networks Thinking Themselves. The talk had many many inspirational moments but one I would briefly like to share is this harmony between the language used to describe elements of  network structure and a network close to my heart:  hedgerows.

In the picture on the right the network is composed of ‘nodes’ and the relationships between nodes are called ‘edges’. In the talk, Professor Basset goes on to exemplify the network model with the brain as an example, where neurons are the nodes and the edges are the connections between them.

The picture on the left is taken from the DEFRA Hedgerow Survey Handbook which shows that ‘nodes’ is the term used to define  the point where hedges connect.

Purposeful design on the part of the hedgerow survey team or a coincidence of language?

What further intrigues me is that in the network model the nodes are the ‘things’ and edges are relationships between them. In a hedge network the edges/hedges are the ‘things’ and the nodes emerge because of the connections between them.