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Art of the Hedgerow
The hedgerow is never truly permanent. The hedge in art reflects the hedge in reality, a shifting entity, a feature that is sometimes lost and sometimes replaced.
Ferneley’s landscape of sickly trees and hedgerows in ruin are faithfully reproduced, providing strong evidence that the contemporary rose tinted view of the countryside in the Victorian ‘good old days’ is a lie. Yet a Lionel Edwards watercolour of the Morpeth Hunt (1927) shows a bashed track-side line of thorn, gappy and unloved, identical to some contemporary hedges, brutalised by a tractor-mounted flail, that are so vocally decried by the campaigners of today. The rural landscape is impermanent, forever changing; its pastoral appearance and prosperity are wholly dependent, not on the farmer or the hedgelayer, but on the policy decisions made by those who sit on green benches in Westminster.
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