Somewhere in the leafy depths of British suburbia, a thick circular hedge sprouts from the top of a grassy hill in the middle of a roundabout. The top of the hedge is carefully trimmed with rectangular crenellations, giving it the look of a motte-and-bailey castle, while a second more threadbare hedge encircles the foot of the mound, like another layer of defence. The surrounding streets are lined with more hedges, some neatly trimmed, some left wild, some poking up behind high brick walls, others climbing even higher than the homes they shield.
This single image, taken by photographer Gareth Gardner, somehow encapsulates all of the anxieties and ambitions of the great British hedge. This trophy clump of privet – part defensive barrier, part symbol of domestic pride – stands as a shrubby monument, raised aloft on a grass plinth for all to admire, as they drive past on the way back to their own hedge-fringed homes.
Gardner happened upon the roundabout by chance, in Kingsmead, near Northwich in Cheshire, when he was retracing the footsteps of the late architecture critic Ian Nairn. In the 1950s, Nairn undertook a rage-fuelled road trip from Southampton to Carlisle, railing against what he called “subtopia”, the kind of mindless identikit sprawl that was taking over the country like “creeping mildew”.
But Gardner found beauty where Nairn had despaired. And when he spotted this privet-crowned roundabout, it sparked an awakening of a long-held, mostly subconscious, fascination with hedges – which he has now unleashed in a new exhibition, Close to the Hedge, at his gallery in Deptford, London.
“They say the Englishman’s home is his castle,” says Gardner, “and here was a castle made out of a hedge! What could be a more fitting symbol of British suburbia?” He grew up on a hedge-filled housing estate in Leamington Spa, and recalls childhood caravan holidays where his family would often pitch up behind a hedge for privacy.
“The more I thought about hedges, the more I realised how British they are, speaking of isolation, boundaries, neighbourly disputes, keeping up appearances. There’s a sense of mystery to them too – is the suburban hedge there to block out the outside world, or to hide something from other people?”
Gardner decided to launch an open call for pictures of hedges, aimed at both professional photographers and enthusiastic amateurs, and he was inundated with responses. “I thought it would be great if I got 15 people replying,” he says. “I ended up with 500 submissions. So many people said, ‘I thought I was the only one who liked hedges!’ I feel like I’ve accidentally created a support group.”
The images on show cut a compelling cross-section through the hedge in all its many forms and functions, from shaggy laurels to obsessively manicured works of topiary, litter-strewn hedgerows to bold shrubs that have leapt the fence and taken on a feral life of their own. The landscapes range from suburban England to industrial Germany, urban Hollywood to the deserts of Arizona – where dusty clumps of tumbleweed have organised themselves into their own kind of wild west hedge.
Photographer John Angerson presents a series of haunting black and white shots of suburban hedges, taken within walking distance of his home near Reading. Captured with a vintage Rolleiflex camera, and mostly taken in winter, they depict a range of front garden hedges in their most raw, dishevelled state, shaggy specimens that seem to be increasingly out of control.
One has sprouted a periscope-like appendage, as though keeping watch over the neighbourhood. Another has almost entirely engulfed a road sign, showing a tiny 5mph circle peeping out from a big bush, like a beady cyclopean eye. Through Angerson’s lens, the untamed hedge takes on a menacing air, a threatening presence looming on the horizon of the suburban subconscious.
They can be a contentious thing. Unlike house extensions and garden fences, there are no laws governing hedges in England. You don’t need permission to plant one, and there are no limits on how high they can grow – making them a symbol of liberty for some. As Oliver Dowden told the Conservative party conference in 2022: “The privet hedges of suburbia are the privet hedges of a free people. And I will make it my mission as chairman to defend those values and those freedoms.” A local council can, however, take action if a hedge is deemed to be affecting someone’s “reasonable enjoyment of their property”, making hedges the frequent source of long-running neighbourly feuds.
In 2003, an argument over a hedge in Lincoln (which stood no more than a foot high) led one man to shoot his neighbour, then take his own life. Two years later, another Lincolnshire pensioner was found guilty of urinating on his neighbour’s hedge under the cover of darkness, as part of a long-term campaign to kill the hedge – earning him the tabloid nickname, the Midnight Piddler. The hedge in question was the notorious Cupressocyparis leylandii, or Leyland cypress, “the most planted and the most hated garden tree,” according to the Collins Tree Guide.
One retired teacher in Birmingham spent 20 years trying to get his neighbour to cut back their 10.5 metre-high leylandii. He ultimately won the case, by which time court costs had spiralled to £100,000. On hearing of his defeat, the hedge-owner in question placed a cardboard coffin outside his house, with the epitaph: “RIP My Lovely Trees, whose gentle green mantle has so nobly softened my gaze against the ugly reality beyond.”
Possible undertones of such neighbourly anguish can be detected in a gargantuan hedge captured by Wales-based artist and photographer Richard Shipp. Four thick trees stand shoulder to shoulder in his large photograph, forming a hefty wall of bristling foliage that takes up almost the entire frame, threatening to block out the sky. Or is it a welcome screen, masking the unsightly world beyond? Shipp says his own workroom has a view of his front garden, which is bordered by eight-foot high hedges. “It is deliberate,” he says. “I cannot see the world, and the world cannot see me.” One person’s light-stealing menace is another one’s cosy garden backdrop.
Other images show how the hedge can also be something for others’ enjoyment, standing as the public face of the private home, a green gift to delight passersby. In his documentation of suburban California, photographer Enoch Ku has discovered a pair of topiary delights. One looks like a row of exploded Big Macs, the plants trimmed into what could be the layers of a burger, or slices of hedge threaded on to kebab sticks.
Another of his photos shows four shrubs expertly trained into the shapes of a diamond, club, heart and spade, planted in front of the blank gable wall of a suburban tract house, with the stars and stripes fluttering patriotically in the background.
“Is it the home of gamblers?” asks Gardner. “Do they like playing cards? Or maybe they’re obsessed with Alice in Wonderland?” Whatever the case, it brings a welcome injection of Las Vegas razzmatazz into this otherwise anonymous street. In a similar vein, Joe Humphrys has captured a row of jaunty topiary trees in Germany that looks like a lineup of toilet brushes, while Cristina Lopez has found a similar scene, where a cluster of topiary pom poms are carefully held apart by a wooden prop, in front of a white picket fence.
Bathos abounds. Courtney Blash presents a perfectly 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, providing a green garnish to the base of a dilapidated postwar block.
An Devroe has captured the surreal sight of a row of trees trimmed into precise cones, sprouting from the middle of a Belgian field like chess pieces awaiting a battle, while Francesco Russo’s striking aerial shot shows how the rigid rows of photovoltaic panels in a rural solar farm near Bristol must accommodate the higgledy-piggledy patterns of existing hedgerows. The message is clear: whether in the suburbs, the countryside, or urban edgelands, the humble hedge trumps all in its mastery over the landscape.
