“This is the week I’m overseeing the planting of trees and shrubs for topiary,” says Tania Compton, the garden designer who was once this magazine’s Garden Editor, and who is behind the famous cloud-pruned hedge at Reddish, and the garden at Longford Castle, where planted squares are linked by low box hedges and small obelisks of yew. “Nothing that was planted in the spring did well, because we had such a hot summer,” she continues. In other words, if you are thinking of topiary in your own garden, then now is the moment to put those thoughts into action. But a word of warning: topiary is not as straightforward as might be assumed. Don’t, for instance, imagine that you can get around global warming by planting something that does well in Mediterranean climes; “my absolute horror is cloud-pruned olive trees. They look like something half-way between a giant bonsai and a Crufts poodle,” says Tania, decidedly. “You can only cloud prune a tight evergreen.” It transpires there are dozens of other ways of getting it wrong too. As ever, we’re here to help.
The word topiary derives from the Latin topiarus, which means ‘ornamental gardener’, and the first written records appear in manuscripts by Pliny the Younger, who described box hedges cut into shapes and elaborate animal topiary at his Tuscan villa. England hosts the oldest topiary garden in the world, specifically the garden at Levens Hall in Cumbria, where box and yew trees are sculpted into both abstract and geometric shapes. There are many more beside; at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire, neat yew hedges arise like buttresses, bringing a dose of formality to the dahlia walk. At Clivedon, the Italianate mansion where the now Duchess of Sussex stayed the night before she married Prince Harry, yew peacocks perch on wide columns. These gardens are not what you might describe as low maintenance; “topiary usually needs clipping twice a year,” remarks the gardener and artist Robin Lucas. It also needs sufficient earth to grow in. Both these facts go some way to explaining why the topiary leopard outside Savoy Hotel on the Strand is, rather disappointingly, plastic.
And herein lies the issue. Topiary’s status has become muddled by such examples, by supermarket-bought faux-box baubles (you can buy them pre-strung with fairy lights; online reviews warn that the green leaves fade to blue after a couple of years) and tight swirls flanking the entrance to a country pub, “which is particularly incongruous when the pub in questions is somewhere wild, like the Yorkshire Dales,” points out Robin. It’s not simply its being plastic that makes it naff; “when I first moved into my house, which is an old mill house, there was a hawthorn Mickey Mouse with milk bottle eyes,” describes Robin. Jeff Koons’s giant floral puppy has a lot to answer for – but then he deliberately employs saccharine iconography to break down the divide between high culture and popular culture. Do you want people to praise your plot for its kitsch? Or would you prefer it beatified for its beauty?
If you’re devising a scheme, know that topiary generally falls into one of two categories. There’s architectural, which includes arched walkways and box-bordered paths, and whimsical, which accounts for peacocks, chess pieces, mythical beasts, Disney, and more. You need to decide on plant type, which our current Garden Editor, Clare Foster, advises on here – remembering that you need something fast-ish growing, and yet not so fast that’s it needs constant clipping. Also, says Robin, “don’t do piebald topiary. Pick one plant per shape and stick to it.” He emphasises the importance of giving consideration to where you are, explaining that “a cottage garden can take topiary as well as castle grounds, but it shouldn’t detract from the cottage itself.” He recommends buying a copy of Nathaniel Lloyd’s Topiary: Garden Craftsmanship in Yew and Box – Nathaniel being the father of Christopher Lloyd, who used topiary so effectively at Great Dixter.
Of course, most of us don’t have Elizabethan manor houses and corresponding gardens to play with, but are working with slightly smaller spaces, for which Tania has general rules by which she abides. Firstly, she prefers a looser clipping. Secondly, if you’re going for height, “anything below four feet should really be in one piece, for instance, a cone shape. Go higher, and you can add a second tier” - such as a ball on top of the cone, “though that’s got to be in scale,” says Robin. “Something tiny on top of something big looks ridiculous.” Thirdly, Tania never does matching – which she equates to not having a matching ‘three piece suite’ in your sitting room. “I’d do a mixture of two tier and simple cones, in tear drop shapes and pear shapes – essentially picking three shapes and never aiming to get all of them exactly the same size. Because unless you’re making Levens Hall from scratch, you don’t want that level of formality.”
Returning to puppies, leopards, and cartoon characters, Tania and Robin both enthuse about whimsical topiary, so long as it is done right. “Some of the loveliest I’ve ever seen is a mother hen and her chicks on a lawn,” says Tania. “You can really do anything that you like with whimsical topiary,” continues Robin, “provided you do it with conviction. You can buy all sorts of frames – you just have to know that if you decide to grow, say a flock of fairies, there are some people who will judge you for it.” Ultimately, it comes back to individual taste – topiary is yet another means of expressing it.
