English Topiary Gardens by Ethne Clarke

From the inside front cover:

"England has the finest examples of topiary in the world: simple geometric shapes, fanciful figures, clipped in yew studding velvet turf, knots and parterres of fragrant herbs and box, shaded arbours and arcades of yew, hornbeam and beech, elegant avenues of pleached and pollarded lime, chestnut and ash that have won the admiration of garden lovers the world over.

The clipping and training of trees is one of the oldest garden art forms. The Romans used the word ‘toparius’ to describe a garden designer, Renaissance Italian gardens were given architectural emphasis by borders and walls of clipped cypress, and in the seventeenth century the French were obsessed with topiary since it exemplified their garden credo of man suborning nature to his own device. But the Dutch were the true masters of the art and it was their nurseries that supplied the raw materials to garden-makers throughout Europe and Britain. By the end of the seventeenth century no English garden was complete without regiments of leafy figures and parterres clipped in geometric precision.

Sadly most of these gardens were replaced by ‘landscapes’ in the eighteenth century; the topiary garden at Levens Hall in Cumbria is one of the few that escaped destruction. But the art was also preserved in many cottage gardens where peacocks grow in yew at the cottage door and boxwood pussycats crouch on top of boundary hedges. This, and the resurrection of the Italianate garden at the end of the last century, saved topiary from oblivion. Victorian and Edwardian landscape designers revived its use to add formality and a touch of old-fashioned charm to their creations.

Ethel Clarke and photographer George Wright toured England seeking topiary throughout the land, gathering information about its history and cultivation from the gardeners who tend it. They photographed examples in great gardens like Levens Hall and Hidcote, at Hatfield with its two mazes, at Great Dixter with its lavender garden and array of eighteen peacocks, and at Biddulph Grange with its yew Egyptian temple; but they also discovered less imposing examples in manor and cottage gardens from the west Country to the Lake District. There is the privet shunting engine and the Venetian gondola at Rangeworthy in Avon, the yew cross at Basing, the four hens (one of which faces the wrong way) at Chenies Manor in Buckinghamshire, the wedding cake, once a spiral of six twists, outside the fifteenth century cottage at Rudgwick in Surry, the rabbit at Bewley Common in Wiltshire and ‘Old Nessie’ in a West Midlands street. Over 135 colour photographs document English topiary at its best and display the huge variety that is to be found."