I have finally trimmed my two pieces of topiary yew, a job that should have been done in August according to the books, though I noticed when we visited Hidcote in the third week of September that the National Trust hadn't finished cutting all of theirs. Still, I bet they finished before November the twenty-first. They have more gardeners, though, while I have only me, and lots of other things needed doing as well.
Mine are not very good specimens, technically speaking, though I can feel a glow of achievement that I trained them myself from eighteen inch tall young plants. They evolved to a traditional design, with a rather square shouldered tapered cylindrical base, then two cake stand style tiers and a bobble on top, started at a period in my gardening life when I was very much under the spell of Great Dixter. Given that we live in a 1960s vaguely modernist house, if I were starting now I'd probably try and create something more contemporary, instead of Edwardian cum Levens Hall revivalist. They are growing quite vigorously, and given a few years remodelling they could be changed, but much like growing out a short haircut the process would be ghastly in the intermediate stages and I can't summon any enthusiasm for the project.
They are cut freehand, not over an iron former, and the results are slightly wonky, since I do not possess the talents of neatness or symmetry. I don't want to chop into them hard now, but maybe in the spring I should try and even up the bases a bit, to make them more circular and so that the trunk supporting the upper tiers emerges centrally instead of off to one side. Maybe I should carry a tape measure with me while cutting them, instead of checking the diameter using my erratic eye. There's a thought.
Their heights are a physical manifestation of my own, since they are limited to the upper distance I can reach standing on the top rung of our folding ladder. One of them began to run away from me over the past couple of years, and I toyed with the idea of buying a Japanese pruning tripod to reach its topmost extremities, but today with pruning saw and bow saw I cut the top out to bring it back to the maximum I could reach from the steps. It looked more balanced like that anyway.
My pruning method is idiosyncratic, since rather than going over them with shears I use secateurs, raking through the foliage with the finger tips of my spare hand so that I'll nip back any shoots that have curved round out of the way of the cutting blades. Then I grasp the twigs as I cut, and throw the prunings straight into a bucket, until I get to the top tier when I need my spare hand to hang on to the tree, and resort to flicking the cut twigs to the ground. Some don't make it clear of the plant, and lodge among its foliage lower down, which is a nuisance since they don't show up well while freshly cut, but will once they've gone brown. If I had more to do I'd use shears, but I like the precision of the secateurs, and the fact that ninety per cent of the cut material goes straight into a bucket and I don't have to pick it up. And yes, I could theoretically put a sheet down to collect the prunings, but the topiary is in a mixed border surrounded by other plants, and I like to be able to see where I'm putting my feet.
A couple of years ago I found an old bird nest on one of them, but not today. I did have time to notice, as I trimmed them, how different they are from each other in growth habit and leaf. Some of their differences may be down to the soil, which is particularly thin, sandy and inhospitable at one end of the bed, but I should think most of it is genetic. The one to the north is a male, as can be demonstrated by tapping its tiny flowers when they appear, which causes them to release a gust of dust-like pollen. It has straighter twigs and shorter, finer needles than the other, which is female as evidenced by its occasional sparse production of fleshy, cherry red fruits. It has curlier shoots and individually much longer and wider leaves than the first, and the whole plant is inclined to make more upright growth. It was this one that I reduced by a full yard, turning what had been a burgeoning finial back into a pom pom I could reach to cut.
The roots of yew are cinnamon brown, and run far beyond the outer circumference of the crown. They must represent formidable competition within the border, and I suspect that the best way to use yew in a garden is to set it against grass or paving, and not ask herbaceous plants to live in the penumbra of its roots. Of course, lots of great gardens do have yew as a background hedge to borders, even bringing buttresses of yew out into the beds to subdivide them, so it can be done. And it can look very splendid, but probably makes the gardener's job harder in terms of getting the best performance out of the yew's neighbours.
As to why yew is supposed to be cut in August, I'm not entirely sure. With some pruning tasks you can see why you should do them at particular times, or at least not do them at others. If you cut a vine in spring once the sap is rising it will bleed. I have cut one stem experimentally to see what happened, and because it was obstructing a gate I really needed to get through, and sap poured in a continuous stream from the cut end. You would definitely not want to repeat that over the entire plant in case it bled to death. But I'm not sure that it hurts yew to cut it now, at least a light trim that doesn't go hard back into old wood. It is a fully winter hardy plant, able to withstand the cold of our winters, even the very worse ones. If it were not so there wouldn't be two thousand year old yew trees in so many church yards. It has small leaves that can be trimmed without leaving big cut edges that might suffer in the frost. I can't offhand think of any fundamental reason from first principles why I should not cut yew in later November. Maybe August was traditional because that was when the gardeners had time to do it? They wouldn't have been busy planting or dividing things then, staking would have been long done, and the bulk of sowing in the kitchen garden. And growth would be slowing, so the yew would remain looking crisp and trim from that cut right through to the following spring. Like the question of why the UK doesn't have more maritime woodland, it is one to tuck away and bring out again if I meet anybody I think might know the answer.
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