I have become a fan of the hedge in the CCA’s parc Baile. When I arrived at the CCA in October last year, as if drawn with a signal red highlighter, the hedge seemed to sweep across the bright green lawn. When the dense foliage began to thin out and become more delicate in November, the stems of the gouged-in trees were surprisingly exposed. By the end of the month, her blue and white striped winter coat led me to believe that Daniel Buren had undertaken an intervention in situ. When she disappeared entirely under a blanket of white snow, her presence was only evident as a slight undulation of the snowy terrain. She regained her full foliage only in spring, when caretakers released her from her cage. And now in summer, photographing the hedge with the monolithic CCA building in the background, the horizontal lines virtually blur into Andreas Gursky’s Rhine II. Naturally, the hedge has become not only an object of my affection but also my site of investigation.

Originally, the notion of hedge is derived from the Old High German word hegga meaning to enclose, to fence in. The naissance (birth) of the hedge was as a means of protecting crops, which grew into forms of property delineation. While she was also an essential formal element in landscape design during the Renaissance, for practical use she proved easier to maintain than entirely human-made borders. In the 1856 manual Hedges and Evergreens by John Aston Warder, the hedge was promoted as a substitute for the fence, primarily benefiting farmers: “And I here beg to offer that agreeable alternative—the useful, the economical, the practical, and at the same time, the ornamental, Live-Fence or Hedge.”¹ She also delineated the known world from the undefined. Joseph A. Caldwell proclaims in his 1870 Treatise on Hedging in the chapter “Regarding Wasteland,” that “we must grow our fences out of the fertile soil: By so doing, we do not exhaust other resources, for which there is abundant need of the purposes to which they are properly adapted.”²

When entering the grounds of the CCA, we witness the hedge standing sentinel at the fore of the institution. From afar, she conceals the windows of the staff offices, hiding institutional production. She also serves as a visual podium for the public exhibition space circulating above her vegetative cap. Looking from the inside, one could say the hedge serves as a comforting horizon. She embodies the border of one place, and the protection of another. Within the duality, this exploration of the tamed natural feature becomes an entry point for a broader discussion on the relationship between the institution and its immediate surroundings. What is the effect of an object that serves as a threshold, perspective trick, or ideal background on our understanding of the institution?

When Diana Gerrard, Gunta Mackars, Peter Rose, and Phyllis Lambert planned the landscape of the CCA in the late 1970s, they thought of it as an editing tool. The CCA and its surroundings were conceived of as an urban repair for a wasteland that had been marked by the construction of the nearby Ville-Marie Expressway a decade earlier. In the institution’s 1989 publication Canadian Centre for Architecture: Building and Gardens, Phyllis Lambert remarked: “The new landscape had to fulfill several roles. It had to be delightful, and it had to heal the scars of traffic engineering. It was also appropriate that the new park and the garden of the CCA relate to the ecological and built history of the site and city and comment on urban landscape, a subject sorely neglected in Montréal today.”¹ Many design features embedded in the CCA’s park and the gardens, like rows of trees, delineating hedges, or the vast open lawn allude to the area’s former cadastral plan and its pastoral character before it became a terrain vague.²

In 1988, to further understand the existing site, Claude Cormier and Judy Gorton carried out a preliminary landscape report that identified three historical periods of plant association on the grounds of the CCA: native plants, plants introduced by European settlers, and cultivars (species genetically altered to produce particular characteristics). A bound volume indexing species of trees possibly for the selection of plants for the CCA gardens was created to make an appropriate choice. It is unclear who was responsible for the collage-like book containing electrophotographic prints on paper mounted with cut-out colour photographs, but the subjective tone of the brief descriptions is surprising. It seems as if the author of the compilation had made their decision to select Euonymus Alatus, commonly known as burning bush, for the hedge on the basis of leaf colour and propagation, in addition to very good general qualities and resistance, writing: “Fall colour is usually a brilliant red. One of the most consistent fall colouring shrubs, seldom disappointing. Seems to colour as well in the Midwest as it does in the Eastern states,” adding later: “I have had 100% success every time with this species and the cultivar!”

The exact position and setting of the chosen Euonymus Alatus, in a location geographically and climatically far removed from its native northwestern China, can be traced in construction plans from 1988 by Peter Rose.

In April 1989, the young hedge, planted just a year prior, measuring about forty centimetres tall and still growing to its intended height, was photographed by Yves Eigenmann. In the photograph, the roots and foliage are still sparse, and their granularity mirrors the slender metal cornice at the top of the building. What distinguishes Eigenmann’s photograph from others taken just a year later is not only the maturity of the hedge, but the presence of three trees each at her eastern and western ends that have since been removed. When asked about the disappearance of the trees, Phyllis Lambert responded: “They were an error, a mistake; they were a very bad intervention.”

Traces of this change in the elevation and other events related to the hedge can be found in a box in the CCA’s Institutional Archives—a collection of files including records by José-Luis Oliveros, the former Head of Building Services, which dates between 1992 and 1997. This material, documenting the landscaping, maintenance, and development of the CCA park and garden, are a valuable source to understand the care that goes into her upkeep. In particular, the maintenance manual provides a structured description of the measures to be taken throughout the seasons and defines the formal design requirements of the hedge: “The burning bush hedge bordering the low retaining wall in front of the CCA should be trimmed to a constant horizontal along its entire length. The base should be substantially wider than the top to ensure a green wall on the ground…The final height is between 4‘6’ and 5‘0”.”

In addition to the more technical, descriptive documents such as correspondence between the CCA and its landscape architect, Claude Cormier, summaries of daily activities, meeting minutes, analyses, reports, and plans regarding maintenance and landscaping (concerning the irrigation system, drainage and fertilizing, and the application of herbicides and pesticides), a large number of labeled photographs document problems with the hedge that occurred in 1995. Polaroids stored in photo album-like plastic sleeves show how the hedge appears to be fragmented in various places, with gaps in its overall length.

Explaining the purpose of the polaroid documentation, José-Luis Oliveros recently recounted an exceptionally cold winter season in 1994/1995, during which the weight of the ice crushed some of the shrubs. The following spring, they had to be replanted. And in the summer, a black translucent fabric was installed as a small roof to protect the fragile plants from the burning sun. A year-end report summarized the actions taken as a result of these events: “The installation of winter protection should prevent a recurrence in 1995 of the damage caused by frost to the aerial parts. It is planned to replace around fifty of the most affected trees. (…) The pernicious thing about winter frost is that it often manifests its effects over several years of vegetation. In our opinion, burning bush hedges remain fragile.”

Recent decades, for the hedge, could be characterized by the maintenance of an even state. Since the incident in the mid-1990s, each year at the end of November three employees of Clorofila Inc. build a protective winter jacket made of wooden slabs and geotextile for the hedge. This is to prevent her from splaying open or being crushed under the weight of the snow. The cover is removed in early April. However, despite the goal of constancy (and her regular trimming), the hedge remains a natural object. On the surface she can be kept under control, but her roots continue to grow deep into the ground, almost invisible—until now: the small retaining wall towards the lawn has started to move. The straightening of the wall—a delicate undertaking that hopefully won’t cause the plants to fall over—will be completed in late summer of 2024.

Confronted with a growing amount of information, I became aware that the hedge is not only rooted in front of the institution, but also deep within its archival structure in the form of drawings, textual records, and photography.

Commissioned photographers have periodically captured the CCA grounds. These printed records are kept in the institutional archives; only a few are publicly available. Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Laura Volkerding, Michel Boulet, and Gabor Szilasi took pictures in the 1970s and 1980s. Other photographers include Richard Bryant, Richard Pare, Robert Burley, Geoffrey James, and Carlos Letona. Alain Laforest photographed Mel Ziegler’s intervention on the lawn as part of the exhibition The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life. In 2007, Naoya Hatakeyama, produced less classical views of the building and the grounds and only photographed a small edge of the hedge. Many of these photographs include the hedge in its full length, from above, and straight ahead—but she was not the focal point.

Never fully in the frame, she became a centre of attention in the nineties. In addition to the polaroids by the Building Services team, which captured her problems in 1994/1995, another change of perspective was produced in 1996 by the staff photographer F. Bergeron. Some preserved contact sheets contain a series of images taken from the roof of the building—mixed with a selfie of the photographer himself with the hedge in the background. This material is not publicly accessible, but because these documents have been archived and described internally with the same precision as exhibition and publication projects or collection and library material, they acquire the same importance, autonomy, and neutrality in preservation.

Although the CCA and its environs—with the exception of the Shaughnessy House—are not designated and preserved as a National Historic Site of Canada, the self-stored knowledge within the Centre makes it difficult to alter what has been accurately recorded, described, and shared. It seems unlikely that an unkempt hedge will greet visitors and staff as they enter the building in the future. After all, with a hedge comes security. Edward Eigen describes this idea in a 2018 essay “On Hedging”:

“The hedge [is] not only a physical barrier, a means of enclosure, an instrument of appropriation but also a firmly rooted marker of possession. It was adapted to new settings and purposes in the settlement and colonization, or rather the ‘improvement’ of the New World. But hedging just as readily lent its meaning to the other more unsettled realms of value and worth based, if not balanced, in the negotiation of risk and gain. Even in [the seventeenth century], ‘to hedge’ emerged as a way ‘to secure a desperate Bet, Wager, or Debt.’ Security itself can be a fleeting commodity, providing added incentive to hedge one’s property. The current use of hedge to describe an investment instrument that safeguards against potential loss can be traced to 1949.”¹

In fact, the verb “hedge” has evolved from the noun: just as one can hide behind a hedge, one can use “hedge words” such as “kind of” and “sort of,” which can convey uncertainty, create ambiguity, and lessen a statement.² As a verb “hedging” has also been considered among labours, such as “ditching, leveling, draining, building, etc.,” that maximize the potential of underproductive sites.³ Perhaps, shedding light on the people and activities involved in this hedge’s conservation, can create a shift in perspective on the institution. By peeking at its core from the peripheral position of a self-effacing element at the margins of both territory and archive, the institution can be reconsidered.

Over the past few months, the CCA’s hedge has served as a looking glass for me to access and understand the institution, its Collection, and its inner workings, as I have undertaken investigative research—or rather: re-search—to discover and at the same time situate the unassuming hedge within the institution writ large, to find out about her milieu, her natural habitat. I liked the idea that a physical object—an original, connected to the architecture, as opposed to an abstract keyword—could serve as a filter for the vast archive through which information could be retrieved. I started compiling a binder keeping track of the information as it piled up. Roughly organized in ten categories it includes various material from within the CCA archives, CCA staff, and from people unaffiliated with the CCA: archivists, librarians, editors, maintenance workers, decision makers, photographers, and architects who have been valuable allies. After a presentation of the found material in the Study Room, the folder has been acquired by the CCA Library collection. In view of this article, the relevant material concerning the hedge was digitized and put into circulation. The resulting collection is therefore not only depictive of the archiving and working practices developed by the CCA, but also re-inscribes itself back into these same practices.

This progressive conservation goes hand in hand with a semantic evolution of the selected object. In his essay “Landscape is Invisible,” Lucius Burkhardt muses on the immutability of the relationship between the Versailles Palace and its gardens, elevating the permanence of the vegetal to that of minerals: “On the terrace, stone merges into organic forms, into figures and statues; then the first organic materials appear, plants, but in the form of stone-built architecture: as hedges. We are being prepared for the next step from the palace to the forest, for a new transition from the stone built to the natural.”¹ Navigating primary and secondary sources, people, and memories found inside and outside the institution prompts us to reflect on how carefully the hedge has been introduced, adapted, and recorded over the years, and may now itself be understood as a monument—albeit a largely unknown one. The equally surprising and reassuring amount of archival material makes evident that an object some would consider peripheral, insignificant, banal, or transient—difficult to classify between natural environment and built matter—has undergone a process of perception, description, concern, care, and, ultimately, petrification.