I really enjoyed Jonathan Sale’s review of the book in the Independent today, very droll. Here are a couple of extracts…
“It sounds like a hobby for people who find watching paint dry rather too exciting: observing hedges grow. Hedge-laying competitions are never going to achieve the viewing figures of an Olympic sprint. Cutting hedge is not exactly cutting-edge.
Naturally enough, there isn’t much sex or violence in Hedge Britannia…
Hugh Barker digs around in history, prehistory, mythology and his own North London garden, where he managed to grow a (very diminutive – he blames the rubble in the soil) hedge to keep out neighbours’ kids. In the wrong hands, his subject could have ended up as pretentious verbal undergrowth.
Fortunately, we are in the horny hands of a man whose dustjacket snap reassuringly suggests he has been dragged through a hedge backwards and then trimmed his hair with a billhook.”
I guess that was about the look I was going for at the time, so no offence taken…
