A hedgehog is to a hedge what a viper is to a viper pit. Only when one understands what a hedge really is can one then picture in the mind what sort of creature a hedgehog really is.
Consider the truth of the hedgerow, the truth of the cause of the hedgerow, the truth of the end of the hedgerow, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of the hedgerow. Then again consider the hedgerow.
At its most rudimentary, a hedge — tall or short, leafy and branch-firm, box-shaped and continuous – is never just one solitary shrub. It is a collection of individual shrubs brought into line.
A well-clipped hedge, then. is the product of a species of authoritarian mind. More orderly walls is what the world needs.
A similar effect is gained by holding soldiers, ordered into rank and file, at attention, spiritually anticipating a command for parade rest that never comes. Squads become platoons and platoons become companies standing at attention, perfectly still, the individual frozen into conformity. A well-ordered hedge.
With shears in hand, the gardener is the original autocrat. Plants of the earth, do as thou art bidden.
The canon has it that hedges are the sound demonstration of good taste and well-bred restraint. Their possession and maintenance represents enlightened principles which shouldn’t have to be explained, for explaining is vulgar. Correcting is fine. Not pry-vussy, darling, prih-vissy.
Opportunistic social climbers use hedges to improve their own prospects, slithering always upwardly through the sturdy scaffolding erected within and without. Living parasitically in order to climb to an undeserved reward, giving nothing in return for the sunlight which they have not earned and certainly don’t deserve. If think thou must, think of the Great Gatsby’s striving in West Egg.
Rip the vines out by the roots when they’re young, or rue the way that has been prepared for them with compassion and progressiveness. Some plants are better than others. Vines in hedges result in an unkempt, trashy effect and ruins the put-together, well-maintained look a hedge owner should strive for. Keep striving.
What does your hedge say about you? No, really. What does it say?
Is it that you have hard and fast boundaries? That your home is a sanctuary and not a noisy brothel? So that conversations with houseguests can commence unimpeded, even breezes should be polite. A dense, tall hedge will drink up an inappropriate wind and diffuse it amongst its leaves or needles. Or thorns.
Despite its favor among the blue-blooded, a hedge may yet be a tool of subversion.
For those confronting the banal and tedious made flesh in the form of municipal restrictions regarding fence height, discover an ally in the cultivation of a hedge. There is no limit to the height a tree may grow and trees may also be combined hedge-wise, in this way, another exasperating example of the bureaucratic instinct to meddle and be praised can be ignored.
Like Alice, recite:
“How doth the little hedgehog smirk,
to see his leafy bower,
dripping nectar all night long,
regardless of the flower,
As useless regulations dim,
a satisfying flush arises,
with every petty tyrant gored,
we make do with our devices.”
A hedge is all of these things and more. One can get lost in a veritable maze of hedgerows if one tries. Forsythia, burning bush, Arborvitae shrubs. And the Roman emperor of hedges, Buxus Sempervirens, known as boxwood.
But square or rectangular, stately hedgerows need not be the end-all, be-all.
Interrupted in her sunshine walk through the Rondout, Eugenie Dalland, writer and fashion eye, suggests that the hedge is not necessarily classist, but that it all lies instead in its function.
“Depends on how they’re used, for sure,” muses Dalland. “Because they can certainly be used as a means of keeping someone out. I think it depends on the context and whose hedges they are. On the one hand, it has this probably pejorative social function, but then the other side is awesome autodidactic art. The person to ask would be my mom. She would make bushes and trees into the shape of rabbits and cats. She knows all about hedges.”
Dalland recalls living as a child in a Brooklyn brownstone. Her mother had shaped a yew bush into a bunny rabbit. and a tree into a peacock.
Dalland’s mother, Mimi Stafford, painter and candlelight enthusiaist. confirms her artistry.
“There was a little front garden near the steps,” she says. “And on one side, there was a Japanese holly, which is an evergreen with very small leaves. Because it was a brownstone, the whole back of it backed up onto my neighbor, and it had been clipped straight so that it looked like half a tree. So I saw a peacock in it. And so I got a ladder out and started to clip it.”
Underneath the peacock stood a yew.
“You know that book called Goodnight Moon? It’s a children’s book, but in it there’s a rabbit. I used that rabbit as a model. And it’s a rabbit upright. He walks, this rabbit. And then I cut him the same way. Maybe it took two summers or two growing seasons to get it right. And then all the kids would come, and, you know, suddenly they’d see a rabbit and you’d hear them exclaiming outside. So I always loved to cut topiary.”
“Topiary” is the official word for the subversion of the stolidly composed hedge, composing with leaves expressions strange and surprising, familiar or fantastical, uncanny or unsettling, for purposes of concealment or ornamentation.
Stafford had heat pumps installed some years back. The decision was based on ethical considerations, but right away brought her aesthetic remorse.
“They’re very unattractive inside and out,” says Mimi, “And some of them are plopped right up against my garden. But you can surround them with a hedge. So I thought to do first a hedge of boxwood. I put these in a few years ago. And I wanted to cut the suits of the cards — spade, heart, diamond — but I think I’m going to have to take them out.”
A plant may mildew. It may rust. It may suffer smut. Stafford’s boxwood has been blighted, a sort of plant plague. The blight is killing the boxwood, says Stafford, and there’s no cure for it.
For reference, picture in the mind’s eye another variety of blight, that of the hemlock woolly adilgid, The blight resembles ash fallen from a nearby forest fire, settled over tree branches, in between the needles clumped up like snow. The specific blight affecting the boxwoods is not just in the Northeast. It has spread.
“Oh, no, it came up from the South,” insists Stafford, “because all bad things, according to the Yankee mentality, have.”
Stafford doesn’t want to use a fungicide. Undoubtedly it’s poison. To avoid the blight of the boxwood, Stafford considers her options.
“I’m looking at the Japanese holly that I made the peacock out of,” she says. “And then inkberry holly is the other one I have my eyes on. There’s also dwarf evergreen azalea. And yew. But the deer like it. That’s the problem.”
Down south in Gardiner, Keith Buesing, landscaper and topiary artist, swears still by boxwoods. “The variety I most use is a Winter Gem. and I’ve had pretty good luck with that,” says Buesing.
Buesing is a well-regarded quantity in Gardiner for his skill in landscaping, as well as for his topiary deviance, his dramatic treatment of hedges, A few of his topiary offerings currently inhabit hillsides and adorn properties around town.
“At the front of the Gardner Library, there’s a topiary lizard reading a book,” says Buesing. “And there’s another one at Ireland Corners. It’s a much bigger sort of crocodilian type of a lizard. That one’s slightly worse for wear, being in the place and position where it is. One of its hands have been run over but it’s still pretty impressive.”
The advantage of doing reptiles, Buesing says, is that they’re low to the ground. A lizard can be built pretty quickly. Bigger plants for the body, smaller ones for the limbs. When you start out a little big, you can immediately trim your plant down to shape it up pretty well.
Born and raised into the nursery and landscaping business, Buesing has mastered an art that is an outgrowth of his experience with maintaining plants in general.
“They need to be trimmed, otherwise stuff will turn into a jungle,” he says, “so if you’re working on stuff and you’re annually trimming something, you know, into a level hedge, or a sphere, or something like that, then after a while at least my mind started to say, Well, if I can make this shape, why not make some other shape? One thing leads to another, you know, and that’s basically the progression there.”
The big lizard on the hillside at Ireland Corners with the stegosaurus spikes on its back and the open mouth with teeth and tongue is shaped from English yew (Taxus).
Buesing confirms Stafford’s observation. “The only problem with using it is that is that deer love Taxus,” says Buesing.
“Have you ever heard of a guy named Earl Fryar?” asks Dalland. “He’s incredible.”
Revered master of abstract topiary in his South Carolina garden, Fryar ahapes, snips and shears bushes, shrubs and trees to be anything but representational.
Curved and slender, menacing and tilted, a concentric bowl fountain is stacked into a shape that defies simple explanation. The occasional dome or orb often tapers off into odd cotton-candy wisps or terraced arrangements.
Hundreds of topiaries live in Fryar’s garden.
“He’s a total autodidact,” says Dalland. “He started on his own trimming the hedges in his back yard and turned them into works of art. I mean, you can’t feature a hedge in a museum. But his work is recognized.”
In the post-modern movement of topiary as in every post-modern movement, forms have been dispensed with as though formlessness was itself an inspired improvement. A dead end appears to have been reached in the maze of creation. Backtracking becomes necessary so that new combinations can be created. The initial offerings are indistinguishable from the efforts of an amateur, they say, only attempted with a master’s eye.
As form returns, the combinations of the possible multiply.
Enter through a leafy doorway into a ceiling-less room with four stiff leafy walls. Sit in a leafy chair. Contemplate the clouds. Hang a painting. Decorate with topiary objects. Ornamental shrubs, clipped, trimmed, tied, dreams which look alive. They are alive.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” says Stafford. “You could get all sorts of found objects and hang them on the walls.”
After the flash of the post-modernist stab fades, the pendulum swings back to an appreciation for what has come before. Tradition. Convention, sturdy and solid. Let the trees and shrubs choose their shapes, amplify and augment what they themselves want to do.
“People use them decoratively,” says Staford. “I know one in New Orleans that I took a picture of that’s in tiers. That gives it a French look. I mean, the French were big on topiary, but far more formal.”
Stafford says French topiary is less playful than English. “A chess set outside and animals running across the lawn,” says Stafford. “That’s not too French.”
Towering spears taller than a house of what look like arborvitae border an old property on the intersection of Route 32 and Dewitt Mills Road, Impressive and beautiful, impenetrable and private, unmistakably aristocratic but totally functional, two built-up living hedges flank a stone stairway, A stone bench is nearby, but no water basin is in sight.
What do your hedges say about you?
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