The Hedge

I was cutting the hedge today that divides our lot from our neighbors' lot. I hate the hedge. It's in poor shape, having not been attended to well over the years. It's straggly, with big pockets of dead wood in places. I maintain it only so that we can light through our southern windows and walk pleasantly through our side alleyway.

I have my dad's electric hedge clippers which are pretty scary, almost like a mini chainsaw. They make my arms and hands hurt, since you have to hold them at this 45 degree angle in order to "sweep" over the side of the hedge to really do a nice job. Plus, right now I have a sprained wrist, so that is an added handicap and cause for cursing during the job. There is a chain-link fence which the hedge has grown over, and as you are slicing away, you have to be sure not to hit the metal fence. At the same time, you want to get as close as possible since that is the dividing line between the properties.

Today, I got halfway through the job, my wrists and arms aching, when I hit the metal fence. So the blade was bent and there was no straightening it out, at least not today. The only option was to pick up the small, rusty, unsharpened manual hedge clippers and finish the job with those. Oh boy. So I did. And it got me thinking back to life before electric Makita hedge clippers. All those hedges in England! All that snipping by hand! All those hours, all those full time gardeners.

Lately I have been reading my good friend Priya's blog, The Plum Bean Project. She is a historical fiction writer, and her blog centers along the lines I was thinking today. Aside from being a fantastic blog, it has taken me back to imaging things we no longer have to think about. Like attending to all the hedges in England without electric hedge clippers. Which got me thinking about gardening in general throughout time. As a vegetable (food) gardener, I often think about how a) people don't grow their own food anymore, b) even if people do grow their own food, they do not know how to begin with seeds, opting to buy starts at the nursery and start there, or c) how people know little about actually growing the food they want to grow, finding out things via the internet, the backs of seed packages, books. Essentially, how we don't know anything about farming, soil, weather, etc.

But today I was thinking about the importance of tools, the fine art of topiary, how I know nothing at all, and how dependent we are on information and machines.