An artist has taken her obsession with heads and portraits to her garden shaping one of her hedges into her son’s face.
Art graduate Michelle Foley, 48, has trimmed two of her garden hedges into 12ft tall heads into family members, one like son Brennan, the other like partner, Andrew.
Michelle who saw the need to tidy up her hedge growth as the perfect excuse to take her artistic talent outside, is now eyeing up a third hedge depicting her daughter.
Michelle said: ‘I’ve been making heads for years, I did an art degree at Birmingham City University where all my work revolved around heads.
‘I’m really interested in gardening too so when I had to cut my hedges it only seemed natural that heads came out.
‘Andrew looks uncannily like him and Brennan is perhaps not quite recognisable because the glasses aren’t on yet.
‘I’m making the glasses out of things from a skip largely using odd bits of plastic and I think when they go on you won’t be able to tell them apart.’
Michelle who recently started running her own catering business from a vintage campervan, first took to hedge-head trimming six years ago.
The mother-of-two wants to transform her entire garden in Harborne, Birmingham, which she describes as well-hidden and overgrown into a gallery of recognisable faces.
‘I’ve got a lot of hedges in my garden which I’d love to get my hands on. My daughter who’s a bit disgusted there isn’t one of her yet is going to be next in line.
‘They require attention little and often, a trim every now and then is all that’s needed to maintain their shape.
‘Nobody’s ever really seen them because they’re in a really overgrown part of the garden and nobody’s noticed them until now despite being there for years.’
Her son Brennan Black, 21, who is in his final year at Cardiff University was the first to see himself larger than life before being joined three years later Michelle’s partner Andrew Batterham, 51.
Brennan’s hedge portrait is almost twice the size of his entire body and former Royal Engineer Andrew who is as tall as Brennan in real life has a slightly smaller hedge.