Topiary is the art of creating sculptures using clipped shrubs and sub-shrubs. The word is derived from the Latin word for an ornamental landscape gardener, topiarius.
The plants used are evergreen (or "evergray"), have small leaves or needles producing dense foliage. They have compact and/or columnar (e.g. fastigiate) growth habits.
Common plants used include plants such as cultivars of box (Buxus sempervirens), arborvitae, bay laurel (Laurus nobilis), holly (Ilex spp.), myrtle (Eugenia spp., Myrtus spp.), yew (Taxus spp.), and privet (Ligustrum spp.).
Sometimes shaped wire cages are used in modern examples to guide untutored shears, but traditional forms rely on patience and a steady hand; small-leaved ivy can be used to cover a cage and give the look of topiary in only a few months.
Origins
The art dates from Roman times. Both Pliny's Natural History and the epigram-writer Martial credit Cneius Matius Calvena, in the circle of Julius Caesar, with introducing the first topiary to Roman gardens. Pliny the Younger described it in a letter the elaborate figures of animals, inscriptions and cyphers and obelisks in clipped greens at his Tuscan villa.
Within the atrium of a Roman villa or house, a place that had formerly been quite plain, the art of the topiarius produced miniature landscape (topos) which might employ the comparable art of stunting trees, also mentioned, disapprovingly, by Pliny (HN xii.6).
Mediaeval History
Following its European revival in the 16th century, it has historically been associated with the gardens of the European elite and as features in cottage gardens. Traditional forms use foliage trained and/or pruned into geometric shapes: balls or cubes, obelisks, pyramids, cones, spirals etc. Representational forms depicting people, animals, manmade objects have also been made popular.
Examples at Versailles and its imitators was never complicated. Forms such as low hedges punctuated by potted trees trimmed as balls on standards, interrupted by obelisks at corners were often the vertical features of parterre gardens. Sculptural forms were provided by stone and lead sculptures. In Holland though, the fashion for more complicated topiary designs, spread to England after 1660.
The eighteenth century decline
In England it was all but extinct in fashion by the famous satiric essay on "Verdant Sculpture" that Alexander Pope published in The Guardian, 29 September 1713, with its mock 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.
* The tower of Babel, not yet finished.
* St George in box with his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the dragon by next April.
* A quickset hog, shot up into a porcupine, by being forgoten a week in rainy weather.
In the 1720s and 1730s, the generation of James Bridgeman and William Kent removed the English garden of its hedges and mazes, and also its topiary. After the art lost favour in aristocratic garden, however, it continued to be featured in cottagers' gardens, where a single specimen of traditional forms, a ball, a tree trimmed to a cone in several cleanly separated tiers, meticulously clipped and topped with a peacock,form was passed on as an heirloom.
The revival 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 at the topiary that had been swept from English gardens. The following generation, represented by people such as Shirley Hibberd, rediscovered the charm of specimens as part of the mystique of the "English cottage garden", which was revived from the 1870s:
It may be true, that that the natural form of a tree is the most beautiful possible for that tree, but it also may happen that we do not want the most beautiful form, but one of our own designing, and expressive of our ingenuity" (Shirley Hibberd).
Whilst it had featured in only a few 18th-century American gardens, came into favor with the Colonial Revival gardens and the grand manner of the American Renaissance, 18801920. T
The beginning of the revival and maintenance of these historic gardens in the 20th century led to the replanting of the maze at the Governor's Palace, Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s.. | |
