Friday 16 September 2011

topiary

I trimmed one of my topiary yews today.  I only have two, at opposite ends of the long bed in the front garden.  Most of the planting throughout the garden is billowing and informal, and I suppose the yews are slightly incongruous, in terms of their formality, and because they are not merely formal but old-fashioned, consisting of cake-stand tiers over solid bases, and a pom-pom on top.  With the modern house, I suppose they should be some irregular free-form sculptural shape.  They have come out the way they are just because that was my idea of a topiary yew.  The prototypical clipped yew.  I can say that they are post-modern, that will explain them.  They are slightly wonky because I am not very good at cutting formal shapes, and I still haven't got the line of their shoulders right, but I'm fond of them.  They are not even closely matched for shape or size, as the two plants turned out to have markedly different patterns of growth, one more upright than the other.  The taller of the two has reached its absolute maximum height ever, because if I let it get any taller I won't be able to reach the top to trim it, even standing on the top of the stepladder.  Thus our own dimensions are written into our gardens.  If I were a taller gardener I would have slightly bigger topiary.

I found a birds' nest in one of them a few years ago when I came to clip it, hidden away in the pom-pom.  It was in very good condition, and after treating it with flea spray it now lives on the hall dresser, tucked in next to the artisan pottery.  I was hoping I'd be able to do the same thing with the robins' nest in the greenhouse, and instal it in the conservatory, preferably with a joke Christmas decoration robin in it, but by the time they'd finished with it, the nest had largely disintegrated.  I'll keep my eye out for another in a better state as I cut things back this winter.

I've been reading Monty Don's Ivington Diaries.  There is somebody who loves clipped hedges.  Box, hornbeam, pleached lime.  It is an interesting and readable book, printed on nice paper.  But I couldn't be doing with all that clipping myself, which is one reason why we have very little formal hedging.  Grow what you will enjoy looking after, in a private garden you maintain yourself.  Though I am gradually adding more patches of box, in dry or dark areas, that will be cloud pruned to informal mounds as they grow together.  They should function as ground cover, and provide some structure in the winter when many herbaceous plants have been cut down, and deciduous shrubs are mere piles of twigs.  I find it reassuring at such times to have something 3D to look at.

Tomorrow we are off to see the Swiss Garden, which we were going to visit in the summer but discovered that on the day we were due to be there access would be restricted for an open-air performance of Shakespeare.  This weekend they are hosting a steam rally, which means traction engines.  I really don't understand how they work (I mean, I know the broad theory of using steam to move a piston, but I don't understand how they work in any practical sense.)  I like looking at them though, all that paint and gleaming brass, and I like the hissing noises and the smell of coal smoke.  So if Cardunculus fails to post tomorrow it is because we got back from Biggleswade very late.  Though there should be time, while the Systems Administrator does the supper.

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