Managing My Hedge Fun

September 29, 2022, 8:34 am , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz digs deep in The Garden of Sisyphus

The acer is purple and healthy in the autumn sunlight. The pink fuschia, given to us in a small pot seven years ago, flourishes in the salt of the sea air. Behind, a hop vine curls wildly around everything. It’s out of control, gone nuts in the tail end of a dry warm summer.

And there’s that hedge. Stopping it from taking over the planet is constant. Shears, trimmers, secateurs, voodoo incantations, even chainsaws won’t keep the hedge and its sister in the front from growing, bursting, sprouting, growing some more.

Sometime this winter when the growth stops, I’ll go bananas and do Full Crewcut on the hedge including the hop, buddleia, lilac, the beach-rose all intertwining with the privet. I’ll leave the chainsaw to others- a wise old gardener wisely said the tool should wisely (hope you’re getting my drift here) brand itself as ’.. a thousand ways to kill yourself…’ especially when employed on ladders.

But what an endless job. When it comes to gardening, and especially chopping back hedges, it’s a task akin to the legendary toils of Sisyphus, the Greek king condemned by the gods to eternally push a rock up a mountain only to see it roll right back again so he can fruitlessly push it back up again to the top. And watch it roll back down. Forever….

Alot of furious action, little forward motion. I swear sometimes the hedges grow higher, bushier, thicker overnight, sometimes even while finishing s second cup of morning coffee.

After yet another Sisyphian attempt, I head for fields and hills. Everywhere I step I’m told where to go by signposts. Yet even though they point the way, I’m not really sure to where they exactly point.

I mean, what use is a signpost that points three different ways? To where….?

Not much help if you stumble out of God Knows Where in a mist praying for a sign that shows a Public Footpath to Exactly Somewhere Else…Anywhere, in fact. Even if it’s the place you started out from five hours ago with high hopes of Getting Someplace You Want To Go.

Britain is happily decorated with these footpath signs. And to be fair, mostly they work wonders. And if it’s clear weather and a straight road, they are an added bonus:

Like on this shoreline route on the Suffolk coast in eastern England. But how many times do you turn a corner and see a knot of people peering up at all the unknown arrows on a post and checking their maps, their phones, their compasses, each other? I know the feeling. I have a rucksack full of bad mistakes: walking up the wrong mountain in northwest Scotland; going round and around on the top of Haystacks in the Lake District in pea soup mist; following a signpost’s arrow that ended on an unknown beach as light faded and night encroached.