They can swallow road signs and trigger lethal neighbour feuds. From suburban Britain to industrial Germany and parched Arizona, we explore a show celebrating green borders
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”.
