Somewhere within the leafy depths of British suburbia, a thick round hedge sprouts from the highest of a grassy hill in the course of a roundabout. The highest of the hedge is fastidiously trimmed with rectangular crenellations, giving it the look of a motte-and-bailey citadel, whereas a second extra threadbare hedge encircles the foot of the mound, like one other layer of defence. The encompassing streets are lined with extra hedges, some neatly trimmed, some left wild, some poking up behind excessive brick partitions, others climbing even increased than the properties they defend.
This single picture, taken by photographer Gareth Gardner, by some means encapsulates all the anxieties and ambitions of the good British hedge. This trophy clump of privet – half defensive barrier, half image of home delight – stands as a shrubby monument, raised aloft on a grass plinth for all to admire, as they drive previous on the way in which again to their very own hedge-fringed properties.
Gardner occurred upon the roundabout by probability, in Kingsmead, close to Northwich in Cheshire, when he was retracing the footsteps of the late structure critic Ian Nairn. Within the Fifties, Nairn undertook a rage-fuelled highway journey from Southampton to Carlisle, railing in opposition to what he known as “subtopia”, the sort of senseless identikit sprawl that was taking up the nation like “creeping mildew”.
However Gardner discovered magnificence the place Nairn had despaired. And when he noticed this privet-crowned roundabout, it sparked an awakening of a long-held, principally unconscious, fascination with hedges – which he has now unleashed in a brand new exhibition, Near the Hedge, at his gallery in Deptford, London.
“They are saying the Englishman’s house is his citadel,” says Gardner, “and right here was a citadel made out of a hedge! What may very well be a extra becoming image of British suburbia?” He grew up on a hedge-filled housing property in Leamington Spa, and recollects childhood caravan holidays the place his household would typically pitch up behind a hedge for privateness.
“The extra I considered hedges, the extra I realised how British they’re, talking of isolation, boundaries, neighbourly disputes, maintaining appearances. There’s a way of thriller to them too – is the suburban hedge there to dam out the skin world, or to cover one thing from different folks?”
Gardner determined to launch an open name for photos of hedges, aimed toward each skilled photographers and enthusiastic amateurs, and he was inundated with responses. “I believed it could be nice if I acquired 15 folks replying,” he says. “I ended up with 500 submissions. So many individuals mentioned, ‘I believed I used to be the one one who favored hedges!’ I really feel like I’ve unintentionally created a help group.”
The pictures on present minimize a compelling cross-section via the hedge in all its many types and features, from shaggy laurels to obsessively manicured works of topiary, litter-strewn hedgerows to daring shrubs which have leapt the fence and brought on a feral lifetime of their very own. The landscapes vary from suburban England to industrial Germany, city Hollywood to the deserts of Arizona – the place dusty clumps of tumbleweed have organised themselves into their very own sort of wild west hedge.
Photographer John Angerson presents a sequence of haunting black and white pictures of suburban hedges, taken inside strolling distance of his house close to Studying. Captured with a classic Rolleiflex digital camera, and principally taken in winter, they depict a spread of entrance backyard hedges of their most uncooked, dishevelled state, shaggy specimens that appear to be more and more uncontrolled.
One has sprouted a periscope-like appendage, as if holding watch over the neighbourhood. One other has virtually solely engulfed a highway signal, displaying a tiny 5mph circle peeping out from an enormous bush, like a beady cyclopean eye. By way of Angerson’s lens, the untamed hedge takes on a menacing air, a threatening presence looming on the horizon of the suburban unconscious.
They could be a contentious factor. Not like home extensions and backyard fences, there are not any legal guidelines governing hedges in England. You don’t want permission to plant one, and there are not any limits on how excessive they will develop – making them an emblem of liberty for some. As Oliver Dowden informed the Conservative occasion convention in 2022: “The privet hedges of suburbia are the privet hedges of a free folks. And I’ll make it my mission as chairman to defend these values and people freedoms.” An area council can, nonetheless, take motion if a hedge is deemed to be affecting somebody’s “affordable enjoyment of their property”, making hedges the frequent supply of long-running neighbourly feuds.
In 2003, an argument over a hedge in Lincoln (which stood not more than a foot excessive) led one man to shoot his neighbour, then take his personal life. Two years later, one other Lincolnshire pensioner was discovered responsible of urinating on his neighbour’s hedge underneath the quilt of darkness, as a part of a long-term marketing campaign to kill the hedge – incomes him the tabloid nickname, the Midnight Piddler. The hedge in query was the infamous Cupressocyparis leylandii, or Leyland cypress, “probably the most planted and probably the most hated backyard tree,” based on the Collins Tree Information.
One retired trainer in Birmingham spent 20 years making an attempt to get his neighbour to chop again their 10.5 metre-high leylandii. He in the end received the case, by which era court docket prices had spiralled to £100,000. On listening to of his defeat, the hedge-owner in query positioned a cardboard coffin exterior his home, with the epitaph: “RIP My Beautiful Timber, whose mild inexperienced mantle has so nobly softened my gaze in opposition to the ugly actuality past.”
Doable undertones of such neighbourly anguish may be detected in a gargantuan hedge captured by Wales-based artist and photographer Richard Shipp. 4 thick bushes stand shoulder to shoulder in his giant {photograph}, forming a hefty wall of bristling foliage that takes up virtually the complete body, threatening to dam out the sky. Or is it a welcome display screen, masking the ugly world past? Shipp says his personal workroom has a view of his entrance backyard, which is bordered by eight-foot excessive hedges. “It’s deliberate,” he says. “I can’t see the world, and the world can’t see me.” One particular person’s light-stealing menace is one other one’s cosy backyard backdrop.
Different photos present how the hedge will also be one thing for others’ enjoyment, standing as the general public face of the non-public house, a inexperienced reward to please passersby. In his documentation of suburban Sacramento, Californian photographer Enoch Ku has found a pair of topiary delights. One seems like a row of exploded Large Macs, the vegetation trimmed into what may very well be the layers of a burger, or slices of hedge threaded on to kebab sticks.
One other of his pictures exhibits 4 shrubs expertly skilled into the shapes of a diamond, membership, coronary heart and spade, planted in entrance of the clean gable wall of a suburban tract home, with the celebs and stripes fluttering patriotically within the background.
“Is it the house of gamblers?” asks Gardner. “Do they like taking part in playing cards? Or possibly they’re obsessive about Alice in Wonderland?” Regardless of the case, it brings a welcome injection of Las Vegas razzmatazz into this in any other case nameless avenue. In an identical vein, Joe Humphrys has captured a row of jaunty topiary bushes in Germany that appears like a lineup of bathroom brushes, whereas Cristina Lopez has discovered an identical scene, the place a cluster of topiary pom poms are fastidiously held aside by a wood prop, in entrance of a white picket fence.
Bathos abounds. Courtney Blash presents a wonderfully pruned spherical bush marooned in a sea of asphalt, standing between a row of garages like a snippet of Versailles airlifted into the concrete desert. Matt Kerr brings a row of plump privet cuboids, lovingly trimmed like little footstools, offering a inexperienced garnish to the bottom of a dilapidated postwar block.
An Devroe has captured the surreal sight of a row of bushes trimmed into exact cones, sprouting from the center of a Belgian subject like chess items awaiting a battle, whereas Francesco Russo’s placing aerial shot exhibits how the inflexible rows of photovoltaic panels in a rural photo voltaic farm close to Bristol should accommodate the higgledy-piggledy patterns of present hedgerows. The message is obvious: whether or not within the suburbs, the countryside, or city edgelands, the common-or-garden hedge trumps all in its mastery over the panorama.
