“We’re now a tourist attraction on Google Maps,” Londoner Polly Barker told CBS News, pointing to her garden hedge – immaculately trimmed to represent Henry Moore’s famous sculpture. Reclining nude.
CBS went to Barker’s neighborhood to speak with the sculptor himself: a man named Bushe.
Tim Bushe has been trimming hedges for 15 years. It’s his hobby, his artistic expression, a way to raise money for his sister who has Down syndrome, but most of all it’s a way to pay tribute to his loved ones who have passed away, be it the locomotive-shaped hedge in front of his house or the cats across the street.
“It’s her legacy,” Bushe told CBS. Bushe has lived with his wife Philippa for years in a cul-de-sac in London’s Islington district. They met as teenagers at art school and were together for 47 years.
One day, Philippa asked Tim, looking out from the sofa, to trim a cat in the hedge of her house. Instead she was given a pair of scissors, but the electric hedge trimmer seemed to be an artist’s brush and soon Philippa suggested that he trim the neighbour’s hedge too.
The neighbour was physically challenged and unable to trim his hedge himself. It was he who eventually got the cat, so Philippa ended up with an even better view.
Bushe, who works as an architect when he’s not busy hedgerowing, lost his wife to breast cancer seven years ago and continued shaping his neighbors’ hedges until the street was filled with elephants, hippos, fish and other things.
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The hedges are not just for tourists, however. With each commission, Bushe raises money for a foundation that cares for his sister and another that donates to environmental causes.
He is currently running a GoFundMe campaign called “Hedging Against Climate Change” and is raising funds for WWF, Greenpeace, Fridays for Future and The Good Law Project.
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“If she were alive, I think she would be fascinated by how it took off,” he told CBS News, adding that he plans to keep going “until I fall off the ladder.”
You can follow Bushe on his Instagram account Hedgecutterman.
WATCH the CBS interview below…Note: Viewers outside the US will watch it on the CBS website…
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