This article is about the practice of training plants. For the planned Shane Carruth film, see A Topiary. For the hacktivist, see Topiary (hacktivist).
Topiary is the horticultural practice of training perennial plants by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees, shrubs and subshrubs to develop and maintain clearly defined shapes,[1] whether geometric or fanciful. The term also refers to plants which have been shaped in this way. As an art form it is a type of living sculpture. The word derives from the Latin word for an ornamental landscapegardener, topiarius, a creator of topia or "places", a Greek word that Romans also applied to fictive indoor landscapes executed in fresco.
The plants used in topiary are evergreen, mostly woody, have small leaves or needles, produce dense foliage, and have compact and/or columnar (e.g., fastigiate) growth habits. Common species chosen for topiary include cultivars of European box (Buxus sempervirens), arborvitae (Thuja species), bay laurel (Laurus nobilis), holly (Ilex species), myrtle (Eugenia or Myrtus species), yew (Taxus species), and privet (Ligustrum species).[2] Shaped wire cages are sometimes employed in modern topiary to guide untutored shears, but traditional topiary depends on patience and a steady hand; small-leaved ivy can be used to cover a cage and give the look of topiary in a few months. The hedge is a simple form of topiary used to create boundaries, walls or screens.
European topiary dates from Roman times. Pliny's Natural History and the epigram writer Martial both credit Gaius Matius Calvinus, in the circle of Julius Caesar, with introducing the first topiary to Roman gardens, and Pliny the Younger describes in a letter the elaborate figures of animals, inscriptions, cyphers and obelisks in clipped greens at his Tuscan villa (Epistle v.6, to Apollinaris). Within the atrium of a Roman house or villa, a place that had formerly been quite plain, the art of the topiarius produced a miniature landscape (topos) which might employ the art of stunting trees, also mentioned, disapprovingly, by Pliny (Historia Naturalis xii.6).
Far Eastern topiary
Cloud-pruning only distantly related to natural forms in Hallyeo Haesang National Park, Geoje, South Korea
The clipping and shaping of shrubs and trees in China and Japan have been practised with equal rigor, but for different reasons. The goal is to achieve an artful expression of the "natural" form of venerably aged pines, given character by the forces of wind and weather. Their most concentrated expressions are in the related arts of Chinese penjing and Japanese bonsai.[citation needed]
Japanese cloud-pruning is closest to the European art: the cloud-like forms of clipped growth are designed to be best appreciated after a fall of snow. Japanese Zen gardens (karesansui, dry rock gardens) make extensive use of Karikomi (a topiary technique of clipping shrubs and trees into large curved shapes or sculptures) and Hako-zukuri (shrubs clipped into boxes and straight lines).
Simple upright topiary shapes punctuate the patterned parterres of Heidelberg ca 1590, in this view by Jacques Fouquiere.
Renaissance topiary
Since its European revival in the 16th century, topiary has been seen on the parterres and terraces of gardens of the European elite, as well as in simple cottage gardens; Barnabe Googe, about 1578, found that "women" (a signifier of a less than gentle class) were clipping rosemary "as in the fashion of a cart, a peacock, or such things as they fancy."[3] In 1618 William Lawson suggested
Your gardener can frame your lesser wood to the shape of men armed in the field, ready to give battell: or swift-running Grey Houndes to chase the Deere, or hunt the Hare. This kind of hunting shall not wate your corne, nor much your coyne.[4]
Traditional topiary forms use foliage pruned and/or trained into geometric shapes such as balls or cubes, obelisks, pyramids, cones, or tiered plates and tapering spirals. Representational forms depicting people, animals, and man-made objects have also been popular. The royal botanist John Parkinson found privet "so apt that no other can be like unto it, to be cut, lead, and drawn into what forme one will, either of beasts, birds, or men armed or otherwise." Evergreens have usually been the first choice for Early Modern topiary, however, with yew and boxwood leading other plants.[citation needed]
Topiary at Versailles and its imitators was never complicated: low hedges punctuated by potted trees trimmed as balls on standards, interrupted by obelisks at corners, provided the vertical features of flat-patterned parterre gardens. Sculptural forms were provided by stone and lead sculptures. In Holland, however, the fashion was established for more complicated topiary designs; this Franco-Dutch garden style spread to England after 1660, but by 1708-09 one searches in vain for fanciful topiary among the clipped hedges and edgings, and the standing cones and obelisks of the aristocratic and gentry English parterre gardens in Kip and Knyff's Britannia Illustrata.[citation needed]
In England topiary was all but killed as a fashion by the famous satiric essay on "Verdant Sculpture" that Alexander Pope published in the short-lived newspaper The Guardian, 29 September 1713, with its mock catalogue descriptions of
Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the tree of knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the serpent very flourishing.
St George in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in condition to stick the dragon by next April.
A quickset hog, shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week in rainy weather.
In the 1720s and 1730s, the generation of Charles Bridgeman and William Kent swept the English garden clean of its hedges, mazes, and topiary. Although topiary fell from grace in aristocratic gardens, it continued to be featured in cottagers' gardens, where a single example of traditional forms, a ball, a tree trimmed to a cone in several cleanly separated tiers, meticulously clipped and perhaps topped with a topiary peacock, might be passed on as an heirloom. Such an heirloom, but on heroic scale, was the ancient churchward yew of Harlington, west of London, immortalized in an engraved broadsheet of 1729 bearing an illustration with an enthusiastic verse encomium by its dedicated parish clerk and topiarist.[5] formerly shaped as an obelisk on square plinth topped with a ten-foot ball surmounted by a cockerel, the Harlington Yew survives today, untonsured for the last two centuries.[citation needed]
Revival
Beckley Park, Oxfordshire: cottage garden topiary formulas taken up in an early 20th-century elite English garden in a historic house setting
The revival of topiary in English gardening parallels the revived "Jacobethan" taste in architecture; John Loudon in the 1840s was the first garden writer to express a sense of loss due to the topiary that had been removed from English gardens. The art of topiary, with enclosed garden "rooms", burst upon the English gardening public with the mature examples at Elvaston Castle, Derbyshire, which opened to public viewing in the 1850s and created a sensation: "within a few years architectural topiary was springing up all over the country (it took another 25 years before sculptural topiary began to become popular as well)".[6] The following generation, represented by James Shirley Hibberd, rediscovered the charm of topiary specimens as part of the mystique of the "English cottage garden", which was as much invented as revived from the 1870s:
It may be true, as I believe it is, that the natural form of a tree is the most beautiful possible for that tree, but it may happen that we do not want the most beautiful form, but one of our own designing, and expressive of our ingenuity
The classic statement of the British Arts and Crafts revival of topiary among roses and mixed herbaceous borders, characterised generally as "the old-fashioned garden" or the "Dutch garden"[7] was to be found in Topiary: Garden Craftsmanship in Yew and Box by Nathaniel Lloyd (1867–1933), who had retired in middle age and taken up architectural design with the encouragement of Sir Edwin Lutyens. Lloyd's own timber-framed manor house, Great Dixter, Sussex, remains an epitome of this stylised mix of topiary with "cottagey" plantings that was practised by Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens in a fruitful partnership. The new gardening vocabulary incorporating topiary required little expensive restructuring: "At Lyme Park, Cheshire, the garden went from being an Italian garden to being a Dutch garden without any change actually taking place on the ground," Brent Elliot noted in 2000.[7]
Americans in England were sensitive to the renewed charms of topiary. When William Waldorf Astor bought Hever Castle, Kent, around 1906, the moat surrounding the house precluded the addition of wings for servants, guests and the servants of guests that the Astor manner required. He accordingly built an authentically styled Tudor village to accommodate the overflow, with an "Old English Garden" including buttressed hedges and free-standing topiary.[7] In the preceding decade, expatriate Americans led by Edwin Austin Abbey created an Anglo-American society at Broadway, Worcestershire, where topiary was one of the elements of a "Cotswold" house-and-garden style soon naturalised among upper-class Americans at home. Topiary, which had featured in very few 18th-century American gardens, came into favour with the Colonial Revival gardens and the grand manner of the American Renaissance, 1880–1920. Interest in the revival and maintenance of historic gardens in the 20th century led to the replanting of the topiary maze at the Governor's Palace, Colonial Williamsburg, in the 1930s.[citation needed]
20th century
American portable style topiary was introduced to Disneyland around 1962. Walt Disney helped bring this new medium into being - wishing to recreate his cartoon characters throughout his theme park in the form of landscape shrubbery. This style of topiary is based on a suitably shaped steel wire frame through which the plants eventually extend as they grow. The frame, which remains as a permanent trimming guide, may be either stuffed with sphagnum moss and then planted, or placed around shrubbery. The sculpture slowly transforms into a permanent topiary as the plants fill in the frame. This style has led to imaginative displays and festivals throughout the Disney resorts and parks, and mosaiculture (multiple types and styles of plants creating a mosaic, living sculpture) worldwide includes the impressive display at the 2008 Summer Olympics in China. Living corporate logos along roadsides, green roof softscapes and living walls that biofilter air are offshoots of this technology.[citation needed]
Artificial topiary is another offshoot similar to the concept of artificial Christmas trees. This topiary mimics the style of living versions and is often used to supply indoor greenery for home or office decoration. Patents are issued for the style, design, and construction methodology of different types of topiary trees.[8][9]
Notable topiary displays
Topiary at Railton, Town of Topiary, Tasmania, Australia
The Samban-Lei Sekpil in Manipur, India, begun in 1983 and recently measuring 18.6m (61ft) in height, is the world's tallest topiary, according to Guinness Book of World Records. It is clipped of Duranta erecta, a shrub widely used in Manipuri gardens, into a tiered shape called a sekpil or satra that honours the forest god Umang Lai.
A premier topiary garden started in the late 17th century by M. Beaumont, a French gardener who laid out the gardens of Hampton Court (which were recreated in the 1980s). Levens Hall is recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as having the oldest Topiary garden in the world.
Owlpen Manor (Gloucestershire, England) A late 16th-early 17th century terraced garden on a hillside, reordered in the 1720s, with "dark, secret rooms of yew" (Vita Sackville-West).
Great Dixter Gardens (East Sussex, England): Laid out by Nathaniel Lloyd, the author of a book on topiary, and preserved and extended by his son, the garden-writer Christopher Lloyd.
The Tsubo-en Zen garden in Lelystad, Netherlands is a private modern Japanese Zen (karesansui, dry rock) garden that makes extensive use of so-called O-karikomi combined with Hako-zukuri (see above).All seasons close-up of the Tsubo-en (Netherlands) O-karikomi, hako-zukuri topiary.
A topiary garden in Maryland established by award-winning topiary artist Harvey Ladew in the late 1930s. Located approximately halfway between the north Baltimore suburbs and the southern Pennsylvania border. Ladew's most famous topiary is a hunt, horses, riders, dogs and the fox, clearing a well-clipped hedge, the most famous single piece of classical topiary in North America.
One of the subjects of the documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997) was George Mendonça, the topiarist at Green Animals for more than seventy years: "it's just cut and wait, cut and wait" Mendonça says in a filmed sequence.
Busch Gardens Tampa, established 1959. 365 acre property featuring large, colorful and detailed sphagnum topiary.
In popular culture
In the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp film Edward Scissorhands, Edward proves to have a natural gift for topiary art. Numerous creative works are shown throughout the movie.
In the Stephen King novel The Shining, topiary animals that move when people are not looking frighten the Torrance family.
↑ Coombs, Duncan; Blackburne-Maze, Peter; Cracknell, Martyn; Bentley, Roger (2001), "9", The Complete Book of Pruning (illustrateded.), Sterling Publishing Company, p.99, ISBN978-1-84188-143-0
↑ A list of common subjects, including the now rarely used Phillyrea common in 17th-century topiary, forms the second part of Miles Hadfield, Topiary and Ornamental Hedges (London) 1971.
↑ Noted in Charles Curtis and W. Gibson, The Book of Topiary, 1904, p. 15.
↑ Brent Elliott, "Historical Revivalism in the Twentieth Century: A Brief Introduction" Garden History28.1, "Reviewing the Twentieth-Century Landscape" (Summer 2000:17-31) p. 19.
Francesco Pona: Sileno overo Delle Bellezze del Luogo dell'Ill.mo Sig. Co. Gio. Giacomo Giusti, 1620 Angelo Tamo, Verona * Francesco Pona: Il Paradiso de' Fiori overo Lo archetipo de' Giardini, 1622 Angelo Tamo, Verona * Paolo Villa: Giardino Giusti 1993-94, pdf with maps and 200 photos
Sources
Curtis, Charles H. and W. Gibson, The Book of Topiary (reprinted, 1985 Tuttle), ISBN0-8048-1491-0
Lloyd, Nathaniel. Topiary: Garden Art in Yew and Box (reprinted, 2006)
Further reading
Hadfield, Miles. Topiary and Ornamental Hedges: Their history and cultivation. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1971. ISBN0-7136-1193-6
Francesco Pona. Il Paradiso de' Fiori overo Lo archetipo de' Giardini. Verona: Angelo Tamo, 1622.
The early history of gardening is largely entangled with the history of agriculture, with gardens that were mainly ornamental generally the preserve of the elite until quite recent times. Smaller gardens generally had being a kitchen garden as their first priority, as is still often the case.
A hedge or hedgerow is a line of closely spaced shrubs and sometimes trees, planted and trained to form a barrier or to mark the boundary of an area, such as between neighbouring properties. Hedges that are used to separate a road from adjoining fields or one field from another, and are of sufficient age to incorporate larger trees, are known as hedgerows. Often they serve as windbreaks to improve conditions for the adjacent crops, as in bocage country. When clipped and maintained, hedges are also a simple form of topiary.
A parterre is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, plats, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of the garden nearest the house, perhaps after a terrace. The view of a parterre from inside the house, especially from the upper floors, was a major consideration in its design. The word "parterre" was and is used both for the whole part of the garden containing parterres and for each individual section between the "alleys".
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. Most professional garden designers have some training in horticulture and the principles of design. Some are also landscape architects, a more formal level of training that usually requires an advanced degree and often a state license. Amateur gardeners may also attain a high level of experience from extensive hours working in their own gardens, through casual study, serious study in Master gardener programs, or by joining gardening clubs.
A knot garden is a garden style that was popularized in 16th century England and is now considered an element of the formal English garden. A knot garden consists of a variety of aromatic and culinary herbs, or low hedges such as box, planted in lines to create an intertwining pattern that is set within a square frame and laid on a level substrate. The spaces between these lines are often filled with stone, gravel, sand or flowering plants. Traditional plants used in knot gardens include germander, marjoram, thyme, southernwood, lemon balm, hyssop, costmary, acanthus, mallow, chamomile, rosemary, calendula, viola and santolina.
The cottage garden is a distinct style that uses informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. English in origin, it depends on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure. Homely and functional gardens connected to cottages go back centuries, but their stylized reinvention occurred in 1870s England, as a reaction to the more structured, rigorously maintained estate gardens with their formal designs and mass plantings of greenhouse annuals.
This is an alphabetical index of articles related to gardening.
In the French formal garden, a bosquet is a formal plantation of trees in a wide variety of forms, some open at the bottom and others not. At a minimum a bosquet can be five trees of identical species planted as a quincunx, or set in strict regularity as to rank and file, so that the trunks line up as one passes along either face. In large gardens they were dense artificial woodland, often covering large areas, with tall hedges on the outside and other trees inside the hedges. Symbolic of order in a humanized and tamed gardens of the French Renaissance and Baroque French formal gardens, the bosquet is an analogue of the orderly orchard, an amenity that has been intimately associated with pleasure gardening from the earliest Persian gardens of the Achaemenid Empire.
Dutch garden refers firstly to gardens in the Netherlands, but also, mainly in the English-speaking countries, to various types of gardens traditionally considered to be in a Dutch style, a presumption that has been much disputed by garden historians in recent decades. Historically gardens in the Netherlands have generally followed trends from neighbouring countries, but from the Early Modern period, Dutch gardens were distinctive for the wider range of plants available over the rest of Europe north of the Alps, and an emphasis on individual specimen plants, often sparsely planted in a bed. In the 17th century and into the 18th, the Dutch dominated the publishing of botanical books, and established the very strong position in the breeding and growing of garden plants, which they still retain. They were perhaps also distinguished by their efficient use of space, and in large examples, the use of topiary and small "canals", long thin, rectangular artificial stretches of water. When a distinctively "Dutch" style is claimed, it generally relates to formal styles in large gardens in the latter part of the 17th century, stretching on for a few decades.
Ladew Topiary Gardens are nonprofit gardens with topiary located in Monkton, Maryland. The gardens were established in the 1930s by socialite and huntsman Harvey S. Ladew (1887–1976), who in 1929 had bought a 250-acre (100 ha) farm to build his estate. The house and gardens are open April through October, weekdays and weekends; an admission fee is charged.
The Giusti Palace and Garden are located in the east of Verona, Italy, a short distance from Piazza Isolo and near the city centre. The palace was built in the sixteenth century. The garden is considered one of the finest examples of an Italian garden.
Westbury Court Garden is a Dutch water garden in Westbury-on-Severn, Gloucestershire, England, 9 miles (14 km) southwest of Gloucester. It is a rare survival of seventeenth century garden design and was initially laid out by the owner of Westbury Court, Maynard Colchester I, in 1696–1705. The garden has been under the guardianship of the National Trust since 1967.
Pleaching or plashing is a technique of interweaving living and dead branches through a hedge creating a fence, hedge or lattices. Trees are planted in lines, and the branches are woven together to strengthen and fill any weak spots until the hedge thickens. Branches in close contact may grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation, a natural graft. Pleach also means weaving of thin, whippy stems of trees to form a basketry effect.
Living sculpture is any type of sculpture that is created with living, growing grasses, vines, plants or trees. It can be functional and/or ornamental. There are several different types of living sculpture techniques, including topiary, sod works, tree shaping and mowing and crop art. Most living sculpture technique requires horticultural skills, such as grafting or pruning, to create the art.
Stephen Switzer (1682–1745) was an English gardener, garden designer and writer on garden subjects, often credited as an early exponent of the English landscape garden. He is most notable for his views of the transition between the large garden, still very formal in his writings, and the surrounding countryside, especially woodland.
The French formal garden, also called the jardin à la française, is a style of "landscape" garden based on symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. Its epitome is generally considered to be the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV and widely copied by other European courts.
Francesco Pona was an Italian medical doctor, philosopher, Marinist poet and writer from Verona, whose works ranged from scientific treatises and history to poetry and plays.
The Baroque garden was a style of garden based upon symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. The style originated in the late-16th century in Italy, in the gardens of the Vatican and the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, and then spread to France, where it became known as the jardin à la française or French formal garden. The grandest example is found in the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV. In the 18th century, in imitation of Versailles, very ornate Baroque gardens were built in other parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain, and in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In the mid-18th century the style was replaced by the less geometric and more natural English landscape garden.
A formal garden is a garden with a clear structure, geometric shapes and in most cases a symmetrical layout. Its origin goes back to the gardens which are located in the desert areas of Western Asia and are protected by walls. The style of a formal garden is reflected in the Persian gardens of Iran, and the monastic gardens from the Late Middle Ages. It has found its continuation in the Italian Renaissance gardens and has culminated in the French formal gardens from the Baroque period. Through its design, the garden conveys a sense of established order and transparency to the observer.
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