If you are an arborist or topiary enthusiast, this might send you over the hedge.
Dunedin author Antony Hamel is about to publish his fourth Dunedin track and trail guidebook – this time, about the hedges of Andersons Bay, which includes ‘‘The Oculus Hedge’’ and ‘‘The Hedge of Death’’.
The 64-year-old lawyer by day has spent many of his evenings over the past 30 years writing the guidebooks which take people on history-laden trails of the city’s disaster-stricken areas – like the Abbotsford slip and David Bain’s paper run – and some of the popular walking tracks around the city.
He said inspiration for his latest series came from an article in the Otago Daily Times about Musselburgh’s ‘‘hedge of death’’.
The 80m-long, 5m-high and 4m-wide row of macrocarpas sits on the edge of a 40m-high cliff in Alton Ave, Musselburgh, and is known by arborists as ‘‘the deadliest hedge in Dunedin’’.
Retired arborist Dave McPhee said he and others trimming the hedge in the early days, had a very healthy respect for the 112-year-old hedge.
‘‘It’s always been a very dicey hedge to touch, because in the early days we used to try to walk along the top.
‘‘The difficulty was finding the branches that would support your weight.
‘‘Who knows where you would end up – especially when you’re working on the edge of a cliff face.
‘‘It would have killed you if you’d fallen.
‘‘It’s the deadliest hedge in Dunedin.’’
Mr Hamel said he had sold more than 12,000 walking guidebooks, but it had been 18 years since he had published a new one.
Now fans of his publications were calling for new material.
‘‘It was inspired by the article about Dunedin’s deadliest hedge in the ODT.
‘‘When I went and looked at it, I thought, ‘Gee, that is deadly’.
‘‘It’s really visible from Musselburgh.
‘‘I also have a series of very early cadastral maps, done in the 1900s by a guy called WT Neill, and it shows a series of significant hedges being planted in Vauxhall – long rows of trees down the edges of the subdivisions.
‘‘And so I thought, well, you can go and look at ‘Dunedin’s deadliest hedge’, and then you could wander over to Vauxhall and look at the Vauxhall macrocarpa hedges.
‘‘Of course, one of those is in Braeburn St – an amazing piece of topiary – a hedge with the most amazing ocular window.’’
The guidebook, like his others, would include information and history about each of the sites.
Mr Hamel said he was part of the Summertime Walkers group which did weekly walks around the city, and he had tested his latest guidebook on its members.
It seemed to go down well with them, he said.
Â