Clive Leeke, 60, is a hedgelayer, a role he’s performed for the past 25 years. His interest in the craft was first piqued at the age of six, after seeing a pleacher – the colloquial term for someone doing the job – working on a roadside in rural Oxfordshire.
It was a rare sight in post-war Britain, when hedgelaying was a largely dormant industry. His family moved house shortly afterwards, and “lo and behold, there were some hedgelaying tools left in the shed”.
After school, he took up horticulture and garden design as a way of using his creative skills. Working freelance, his summers were busy, but the cold winter months were quiet.
“Hedgelaying just came back to my mind,” he says. In the winter of 1989, he took a place on a six-week course – found in the back pages of an Oxfordshire newspaper – and began badgering his gardening clients into letting him lay their hedges. He set up his company, Hedgecraft, a year later.
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