Sunroof Gardening... It Works

For the last year, I have allowed my back hedge to run riot, so that I would have plenty of raw materials to create something that my heart has greatly longed for: an archway in the hedge through which to drive my car. Not a metal or wood arch, but one of those chunky, part-of-the-hedge archways. Something a little less exuberant than this, possibly:

Not sure the giant crown motif would really fit, specially after people got a glimpse of the mess within. So, maybe something a little more restrained, like this: 

...and if I did it on a bigger scale, I coud drive my car right between the elephant's legs!

Oh, alright, alright. But you get the idea. Chunky arch in large dense hedge. I quickly realised, after remembering the swan-dive my landscape-gardening neighbour Alan took into a hedge a year or two back, that I was in trouble vis-a-vis getting up to the correct height to tackle the thing. All very well letting it grow, but the base of the arch was going to be at eight feet - the gently waving tops of the monster hedge were now hitting fifteen feet, and my tallest stepladder only stands elbow-high.Even my sooper-dooper extendy loppers can't bridge that gap.

Listen, I have tried leaning a normal ladder against a hedge. All I can say: not a good idea. You think the hedge looks pretty solid, and it does, until you lean an unyielding metal object against it and add 12 stone of human being at the top, clutching wildly-whirring electric hedge trimmers and leaning perilously to left and right. Then, my friends, you remember that actually, a hedge is pretty much a loose collection of twiggy bushy stuff that you have merely clipped into a solid-looking shape, and you climb down again PDQ and thank your lucky stars you came to your senses before you came to in A and E.


Repeat after me: there are no handholds on a hedge. None.


Attempted similar feat on a windy day: I held on extremely tight to my oscillating ladder, surrounded by the sound of rushing wind and the creaks and groans of wood against wood. It really doesn't help that we get terns and gulls flying around this place. With your eyes closed, honest to God you could believe you were clinging to the rigging, up the mast of a sailing ship in the Roaring Forties or something (think I may have watched 'Pirates of the Caribbean' a few too many times lately).

So... major laddery problem for the construction of the arch. Then, driving beneath the spot one sunny day with the sunroof open, I had a brainwave: if I stopped the car in the right place, and stood on the console between the front seats with most of me sticking out of the sunroof, I would be pretty nearly at the right height. Eureka!

So yesterday, arriving home in bright sunlight at about 8.15am after my usual morning jaunt to the Shire to feed the horses and chickens and acquire more muscle mass on my upper torso (about which much, much more later), I drove under my towering, drooping bastions of privet and suddenly decided that today was the day. Opened sunroof, fetched cable ties, placed feed sacks on the console to save the leather, and after a bit of grunting and struggling, emerged triumphant from the sunroof brandishing my secaturs. And so early arrivals for the Saturday market will have seen me, stuck Pooh-Bear-like in the sunroof, wrestling with great swathes of privet in my mission to cable-tie them together overhead. The car is full of bits of leaf and twig, and I almost, in one incautious moment, put a great dent in the roof, but it's done - I have the beginnings of my arch! Now feeling all pumped-up and proudly gardenery.