Yew must be kidding! Lord spends £5,000 to trim his hedge...which is 40ft high

Even the most ardent gardener can find trimming the hedge a bit of a chore. But next time you pick up the shears with a heavy heart, count yourself lucky you don't have this giant to contend with.

Towering 40ft into the sky, it is the tallest yew hedge in Britain. And however unkempt your borders look, tidying them up is a doddle in comparison with the mammoth job involved in maintaining it.

For it takes no less than a pair of workers, a cherry-picker and two days of solid hard work, costing more than £5,000, to give the 300 year old hedge on Lord Allen Apsley's Bathurst Estate in the Cotswolds its annual trim.

All the graft does not just result in an immaculate looking garden, either. The cutting back of six inches of new growth this year produced more than a ton of clippings, which are then used to produce a life-saving cancer drug.

Yews produce compounds called taxanes which can stop the creation of new cells, and are thus invaluable to halt the growth of tumours.

The Bathurst clippings are collected by an agency which then sells them on to pharmaceutical companies who chemically extract the taxane from the clippings, purify it, and convert it into the chemotherapy drug docetaxel.

The drug has helped thousands of women in Britain overcome breast and ovarian cancer, and is also used to treat cancers of the lung and head.

The hedge is 33ft wide and stretches for 150 yards along the side of Lord Apsley's historic mansion near Cirencester.

As this year's trim was under way, he said: 'It runs right along the front of the house. You can actually see it from the town as it's taller than the wall.

'It's difficult to know exactly how old it is, but we think it was planted in about 1710.'

The 47-year-old father-of-two described how the hedge has pride of place in his garden, running in a semi-circle around the house.

He said: 'Cutting it isn't too dangerous but you do have to be careful. Luckily a man called Tim Day has been cutting it for 35 years so I think he knows what he's doing.'

Before cherry pickers were used in recent years, teams of staff at the estate used to climb up onto rickety ladders leaned together in an A-shape to trim the bush with garden shears.

Lord Apsley said: 'It must have been a very dangerous operation which took many people a long time to complete.'

The Apsley family have been on the estate since 1695 and use most of its 14,500 acres to grow crops.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's tallest hedge of any type is the beech hedge at Meikleour in Perthshire, which ranges from 80ft to 120ft.