CUT IT OUT!
Gardener tells drunks to stop fooling around with his hedge (even if she is a naked lady … )
WEARING nothing but a necklace, she cuts an alluring figure, especially during the early hours after a few too many drinks.
Gloria the ‘green lady’ reclines in a seductive pose, her hand in her hair, looking towards the street.
She may be nothing more than a privet hedge shaped like a naked woman – but some drunken passers-by can’t resist the urge to pretend to be amorous with her.
The sounds of people fooling around on top of the topiary as though they are making love has become a regular late- night annoyance to Gloria’s proud creator, Keith Tyssen, 84.
The incidents damage her carefully sculpted body and take weeks to repair. ‘They’re climbing on top of her – you know, it’s disgusting,’ Mr Tyssen said.
In the latest incident three weeks ago, he looked through the curtains of his Sheffield home at 4.30am to see a man on the hedge and ‘going through the motions of having sex’. He said such behav iour, usually involving drunken men and women, occurred ‘about every four or five months’. He added: ‘It makes me feel a bit sick, really. That’s just not the way to behave – in lots of ways.’
Mr Tyssen recently added the necklace, made of frosted glass, after the hedge had been ‘badly mauled by the youths who pulled her legs apart and generally man handled her’. He said: ‘I felt rather sorry for her looking distressed.’ The hedge at his mid-terrace home was first given topiary treatment by Mr Tyssen, an artist and silversmith, about 40 years ago. ‘It started off as little privet plants and then I made it into a classical Greek figure,’ he said.
In around 2000 he decided to turn the hedge into a ‘curvaceous lady’. The idea for the woman was inspired by a renowned 16th century gold sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini called the Saliera.
She takes a lot of looking after and her shape changes every year. ‘After a week or so she looks as though she’s getting a mohair sweater on,’ he said.
But Gloria – named after a lady of the night who frequented the street decades ago – is also appreciated by families who stop to take pictures in front of her.
‘It brightens up the neighbourhood,’ Mr Tyssen said. ‘I just wish people would treat her better.’