Privacy, please: Most homeowners plant a hedge to provide a little bit of privacy and they’re happy when their living fence grows to be a few feet tall. But if a hedge was planted in the early 1700s, it’s a totally different story. Such is the case with a hedge in the Cotswolds in England. Located on the Bathurst Estate, this yew hedge is over 300 years old and is 40 feet (12 metres) high, 33 feet (10 metres) wide and it extends for 450 feet (137 metres) in a semi-circular formation. It takes two men 80 hours to trim the gigantic hedge using a cherry picker and electric trimmers. The clippings (and there are many) are used in the production of a cancer-fighting drug.

Good investment: Lots of people go to garage sales to buy trinkets and toys and household items inexpensively. It’s a great way for sellers to recycle unneeded belongings that will become the future treasures of buyers. That’s an understatement for a family in New York (US) who spent three dollars on an old china bowl at a garage sale. They put the bowl on their mantel and forgot about it. A few years later, they decided to have an expert check the bowl’s history and were shocked to discover that it is a thousand-year-old piece from the Northern Song Dynasty of China. The bowl was purchased by a London dealer for $2.2 million. Not bad for a three-dollar investment!

Heroes: Two brothers from Alberta, Canada, just wanted to do a bit of fishing, but at the end of the day, they were hailed as heroes. Mark and John Chapman were enjoying the day on the lake when, to their horror, they saw a car veer off a nearby road and sink into the lake. They hurried to the scene in their boat to discover that a mother and her teen-aged daughter had escaped the car, but a five-year-old boy was still trapped inside. The brothers, with the help of an unidentified Asian tourist who could not speak English, managed to get the boy out. He was unconscious, but received medical attention and survived, much to the joy of his family and rescuers.

Big baby: There are big babies and then there are really big babies. Usually, when a mother gives birth, she can expect the child to weigh between six and nine pounds. However, a new mom in Germany who gave birth naturally at the University Hospital Leipzig found herself with a 13.5 pound baby she named Jasleen. It was not a total shock, as it was known that the mom had gestational diabetes, which can lead to babies with an above-average birth weight. The hospital had a team ready to deal with any complications, but everything went well for the mother and baby girl.