I had been sawing back and forth between my landlord and his agent over an overgrown leylandii hedge at the bottom of the garden.  As is common with such hedges, it had been let go over thirty years and now was tall enough to block out most of the morning sun in the garden.  My landlord, a perfectly nice but rather, ahem, frugal gentleman, had brought in a professional earlier in the spring who recommended that the whole thing be taken out.  This I most certainly did not want as it was a nesting site for pigeons and mourning doves, and blocked the view of an agricultural warehouse on the other side of the goat paddock.  As is the law here, I would have been perfectly within my rights to call the commune and have them trim the hedge and bill the landlord.  But that was not a solution.   I just wanted a short, back and sides, not a shave or ill will.  So I arranged with the agent that we would address the issue in the autumn after the nesting season and I would pony out for a trim. 

This is the hedge that is the perennial problem between neighbours.  It is often a border feature and because it grows quickly; it is a good privacy hedge.  But it has to be pruned masterfully else it grows out of control and you get the neighbours coming through anyway to rail against your sunblock.  But the problem with leylandii is you just don’t cut them back.  They won’t put out interior shoots, so if you prune them back roughly, all you get is dead wood.  They only grow from the outside out.

So you can imagine my surprise to find my landlord and his wife, an elderly couple of at least 70, out all weekend attacking this 20 metre hedge.  He was shinnying up a ladder with an electric chainsaw, and she was at the end of a rope hauling off branches the size of a baby redwood.  Hercules and Amazon in their dotage were fast tackling this wall of insurmountable hardwood between me and their goats.  Gobsmackedly guilt-making.  I was working inside most of that day but would occasionally feel shitty enough to venture out and help shift branches and proffer cups of tea.  They would hack, saw and drag branches over to their van, load up, make a run to the dump, then come back and start over.  At one point I did make the offer to split the cost of a professional tree service with them, which they graciously refused on the grounds that the job was already half done, which it was.  I tucked my tail between my legs and retreated indoors while Monty the Dog was having a whale of a time wagging his at all the excitement and attention.

By day’s end, a full two-thirds of the hedge was gone and even with the waning sun there was so much more light in the garden and, indeed the house.  The sky was open and huge, like the big skies I had loved in Africa and the Malvern Hills.  And yet....

The hedge was now straggled and ragged, stumps of the trees peeking over the foliage like bad dentistry.  And as welcome as the open light was, it left a queasy feeling of exposure and vulnerability, as if I was now out in the garden in only my socks and foundation garments.  A garden that had once seemed so cosy and inviting now was far too big and less intimate.

But this I could live with if it meant the daffodils bloomed in March rather than May.  Ivy would soon cover the ragged stumps, and once I had filled and re-hung the bird feeder, the birds flocked back as if nothing had changed.  Come spring I am sure I will get used to the big sky and wonder how I ever did without.