Hedge trimming around me is so bad it's not really sensible to ride nice road tyres between October and February. I must have had a dozen or so punctures before swapping tyres to some Schwalbe marathons - which are so far keeping away the puncture fairy, but do feel distinctly less nice to ride.
Incidentally hedge flailing is a perfectly acceptable component of hedgerow management from a wildlife point of view. The dense bushy growth that flailing encourages is good for breeding birds. The problem is when a hedge is repeatedly flailed year on year and never re-laid, the trees/pleachers lose their vigour and you start to get a gappy hedge with lots of empty space, which is much less good for birds & small mammals. You only really want to lay a hedge every 10 years or so, and if you don't trim/flail it in the mean time you'll also lose that dense bushy structure which is beneficial for wildlife. Ideally you'd want to flail different sections on a rotational basis every couple of years, and leave some bits uncut between laying to provide a broad range of habitat, but the "neat'n'tidy" approach of flailing everything to death every year seems to be favoured by most landowners.
Sorry... been doing a fair bit of hedge laying this winter, one of my favourite jobs!