“We’re a tourist attraction on Google Maps now,” local Londener Polly Barker told CBS News, gesturing to her garden hedge—trimmed immaculately so as to depict Henry Moore’s famous sculpture Reclining Nude.
CBS was in Barker’s neighborhood to talk to 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 funds for his sister who has Down Syndrome, but most of all, whether it’s the locomotive-shaped hedge outside his house, or the cats across the street, it’s a way of memorializing his dearly departed.
“It is her legacy,” Bushe told CBS. Down a dead-end road in London’s Islington district, Bushe had been living for years with his wife Philippa. Meeting as teenagers in art school, they were together 47 years.
One day with her view from the sofa, Philippa asked Tim to cut a cat into the hedge of their home. She got a train instead, but it seemed that the electric hedge trimmer was an artist’s brush, and soon, Philippa suggested he do the neighbor’s hedge too.
The neighbor had physical limitations and couldn’t cut their own hedge, and it was they who eventually got the cat, so in the end Philippa had an even better view.
Bushe, who works as an architect when he’s not busy with a hedge, lost his wife 7 years ago to breast cancer, and continued to sculpt his neighbors’ hedges until the road was filled with elephants, hippos, fish, and other things.
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The hedges aren’t just for sightseers, however. With each commission, Bushe raises money for a trust that looks after his sister, and another that donates to environmental causes.
He currently has a GoFundMe called “Hedging Against Climate Change” and is raising money for the WWF, Greenpeace, Fridays for Future, and The Good Law Project.
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“If she was alive now, she would be fascinated, I think, by the way it’s taken off,” he told CBS News, adding that he intends to keep going, “until I fall off my ladder.”
You can keep up with Bushe on his Instagram—Hedgecutterman.
WATCH the CBS interview below… Note: Viewers Outside the US Watch on the CBS Website…
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