The hedgerow is a row of trees and shrubs at the margins of country spaces, one that people lightly manage and partly neglect. It’s a space that attracts and harbors wildlife and offers people wind protection, enclosure, and pest management. Human experience of the hedgerow involves tolerance, annoyance, hard work, pleasure, escape, concealment, impurity and fecundity.
The hedgerow interweaves semi-wild veins into the intensively managed, productive field or orchard. This ancient concept can easily be applied to our current urban environment, where human vigilance maintains tidy and organized surfaces against the city’s continuous reintegration with spontaneous wildness. Peregrine falcons nest on high-rise ledges; swallowtail butterflies lay eggs on feral fennel patches in empty lots. How can we willingly allow wildness back in? Where does wildness become intolerable?
The Urban Hedgerow makes space for the feelings and thoughts that urban wild animals and plants provoke. Instead of a row of trees, we are exploring wall-mounted vertical forms that will comprise varied substrates, from repurposed industrial components like plastic tubing and lumber discards, to habitat for indigenous plants—hosts to indigenous fauna. Guided as much by the work of entomologists, ornithologists, botanists and ecologists as by hope and love for nature’s spontaneous colonization, we are exploring, creating and constructing sculptures and installations that provide hotels and rest stops. Allowing for “nature” means tolerating degrees of neglect and chaos, and cultivating enjoyment, delight, and even awe. The Urban Hedgerow project aims to provoke these multifaceted experiences in the humans below and astride these installations and provide sustenance and habitat for an abundance of insects, animals and plants. The ambition is to create space and allow more of our wild world into the city, and to make people grapple with where they draw the line between wild neighbor and pest.
