the Bathurst hedge
Thursday, July 12, 2012 at 7:04AM 
12 July 1962. Britain's tallest hedge. TopFoto.co.uk
sorry about the proprietal watermark, but the hedge ladder is so interesting. This is from TopFoto's 50 Years Ago Today: 12 July 1962. Britain's tallest hedge undergoes its annual trim which takes three gardeners ten days to complete by hand. Planted in 1720, it is part of the estate owned by the Earl and Countess of Bathurst in Cirencester.
2008: Britain's tallest yew hedge given a trim. The Daily Telegraph, 11 Aug 2008
The quantity-obsessed Daily Mail reported in 2008 that it is now 'the 300 year-old hedge on Lord Allen Apsley's Bathurst Estate', and that it cost £5000 to trim it. The Telegraph, picking up the same feed, adds that 'Two workers spent two days on a 70ft high cherry-picker cutting back six inches of new growth, which produced nearly a tonne of clippings. These are then sold to pharmaceutical companies who use yew extract as a key ingredient of Docetaxel, a chemotherapy drug used mainly for breast, ovarian and lung cancer.'
Who'd have known.
Interesting too that they used to be gardeners, part of the cost of running the estate; now they are contract workers and an invoice must be paid.
Reader Comments (2)
Doesn't mean that the estate doesn't have a permanent staff of gardeners - maybe they don't have a cherry picker and the appropriate working at heights cover (doing it once a year doesn't justify the outlay), so they have to outsource the particularly unique hedge trimming.
oh, this is true. I suppose I was being nostalgic about a time when two men and a clever kind of ladder just got on with it. Part of a discussion about how we can't fix our own cars anymore, etc, etc. Life is sometimes made more difficult and more inaccessible by technology as it comes with such a cost.
I thought we might do an issue of the magazine on weak systems, as at some point in the nearish future we might have to go back to them.