Border Patrol
Every photographer has a picture of a hedge, that cliché of deadpan landscapes, in their back catalogue. I began this photo series during daily permitted lockdown excursions in Edinburgh in March 2020. At a time of national crisis, the humble border hedge took on a renewed sense of purpose.
‘Hedges are also an admirably versatile metaphor. In Brexit Britain, they are a barrier. In Covid Britain, they are a frontier: this far but no farther. Most of all, in a Britain battered by recent economic and political storms, they are a much-needed hug. Other nations love their hedges, too, of course, but only in Britain do they seem so bound up with national identity. The hedge speaks to the romantic idea of the country as a green and pleasant land, but its cheerful dullness undercuts this notion before we get too carried away. Our souls are in those hedges and those hedges are in our souls.’
Peter Ross, Smithsonian Magazine
We have been told ad infinitum that ‘nature is healing’, but it is also true that nature is trying to kill you. Viruses are natural, after all. Even in your garden there’s a visible, bullet-time battle to the death as plants smother plants, insects attack and chemical warfare ensues. Suburbia is more interesting than you think. We prefer to focus on the flowers, but thorns lurk below. We can discover more about our world from stepping out the back door than hours spent on our phones, if only we look.
A decade before Darwin published The Origin of Species, Tennyson’s In Memoriam grappled with his attempt to harmonise his scientific and religious world views. In Canto 56 of the poem, he described nature as ‘red in tooth and claw,’ but the tranquil greens of plants – green in thorn and branch – are at war too. The uneasy equilibrium between humans and their environment is witnessed at a domestic level in our gardens and urban spaces.
