Random Roofs

Londoner architect and topiary artist Tim Bushe’s trimming talent is a cut above the rest. The hedges at his home and his neighbors are in the form of elephants, cars, a fish, a hippo, and a squirrel.

A photo of neighbor Polly Barker’s hedge, a “reclining nude” that Bushe did, was inspired by British sculptor Henry Moore’s work of the same name.

Bushe calls his hobby the legacy of his late wife of 47 years. She once asked him to make a cat hedge in their yard but he trimmed a locomotive instead. “It was easier,” he recalled. But later he sculpted two resting kittens in the neighbor’s yard across the street so his wife could see them whenever she looked out the window.

And he has been at it ever since, sometimes for charity.

Bushe said he enjoys seeing his hobby making people smile, and acknowledged the coincidence of his name so accurately referencing his passion, according to CBS News.

Meanwhile, Mumbai-based photographer Rajesh Vora shared his collection of amusing pictures of roof architecture in about 150 rural villages in northwestern India’s Punjab state, via an exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France.

One photo shows a replica of an army tank, with the figure of a soldier rising from its hatch, atop a yellow residence in Daulatpur, CNN reports. Another picture shows a whiskey bottle sculpture in Jhander Kalan.

The rooftop motifs in Vora’s photos taken from 2014 to 2019 are water tanks built by local artisans and symbolize the emigrant homeowner’s aspirations and status. Planes, tanks and cars are popular motifs for water tanks.

Plane-shaped water tanks were inspired by model aircraft offerings of Punjabis at a gurdwara or Sikh temple during the 1970s. Many were hoping that they would be blessed with swift visa approvals to leave India, Vora explained, according to CNN.

Those who were successful eventually returned to their villages to add planes to the exteriors of newly built homes, he added.