The Art of Turning a Tree Into a Dog
On a Saturday afternoon in early July, the clouds blackened above Hampton Court Palace, southwest of London. Crowds gathering for the Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival on the sprawling palace grounds reached into backpacks for umbrellas with the resigned look of people attending a supremely English occasion designed to be held in sunshine. We go on being surprised by the weather in England, though it has never given us cause for hope.
At one of the many festival stands, Clare Lenaghan-Balmer, the head of marketing at Henchman, a company that makes high-end ladders, had the air of someone cheerfully awaiting the apocalypse. At 2 P.M., Lenaghan-Balmer—wearing both a fleece and a raincoat—was due to announce the winners of Henchman’s inaugural Topiary Awards, a competition to find the finest topiarists in the country. The idea for the awards had occurred to her after years of hearing about Henchman clients’ elaborate back-garden creations. “People would tell us about these masterpieces,” she told me. “But no one ever sees them!” Also, it was a good marketing ploy for a ladder company; as far as she knew, no one in England had ever held a topiary competition.
After launching the awards in March, Lenaghan-Balmer received more than seventy entries in two categories: home gardener and professional. Photographs submitted by contestants revealed topiary everywhere from suburban hedges to the expertly maintained acreages of stately homes. Britain is a nation of hedges, after all. A series of parliamentary enclosure acts, which intensified in the seventeenth century, transferred much of the country’s land from common to private ownership, its boundaries fenced and hedged. The full length of Britain’s hedges is estimated to be nearly half a million miles, more than its roads.
Lenaghan-Balmer was delighted by the photographs she saw. Among the entries were a tractor, two dogs, and a vast, smiling frog, which had been tightly clipped out of boxwood. The topiarists themselves included a dog groomer who’d transferred her skills to clip a topiary peacock and a professional gardener who’d spent a decade cutting his hedge into the shape of the New York City skyline.
A topiary is not made overnight. The plant, typically boxwood or yew, can be shaped year after year as it grows. The topiarist will use sharp long-handled or electric clippers, or, for the specialist, lethal Japanese shears. For topiary enthusiasts, the obsessional commitment and long-term vision that the practice demands are part of its appeal. Yew can live for a thousand years or more: topiaries, like children, often outlive their creators. Earlier this year, residents of Bishop Monkton, a village in north Yorkshire, were distressed when a thirty-foot topiary cockerel in a cottage front garden was suddenly felled by the home’s new owner. The cockerel had grown for more than a century, present for the comings and goings of the village, its births and deaths. The villagers wished that they’d at least been consulted, the local news site, Bishop Monkton Today, reported.
At Hampton Court, as the rain began to fall, one of the competition judges arrived: the ebullient Elizabeth Hilliard, the editor of Topiarius, the official magazine of the European Boxwood and Topiary Society. Undeterred by the weather, Hilliard wore a floral dress, a pink coat, and a bright smile. She is an unmatched topiary enthusiast, and had been impressed by the standard and range of entries. The photographs had proved a theory she holds that topiary, sometimes dismissed as a quirk of questionable taste by more high-minded gardeners, has been enjoying a resurgence. “There was so much determination to make joy and delight, one way or another,” she told me.
A couple of weeks before Hampton Court, Lenaghan-Balmer had tipped me off about the leading contenders in both categories. The standout professional was a topiarist named Harrie Carnochan, who maintained an immaculate formal garden at Pitshill, a neoclassical mansion in West Sussex. As for the home gardeners, there was one I had to see. A man in Aberdeenshire, in the northeast of Scotland, had created a spectacular topiary display in his garden from some yew saplings he’d planted some forty-five years ago. Lenaghan-Balmer sent me a few photographs. Cut out of the hedge was not a single shape but an entire series, including a whale, two sharks, a cresting wave, and a boat with a man standing on deck, forming an extensive tableau from “Moby-Dick.” Their creator, a seventy-four-year-old named David Hawson, had written an accompanying description: “The gentle curve of a wave touches the stern of Captain Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, on the deck of which stands Queequeg, the highly tattooed South Pacific islander who is poised ready to harpoon the great white whale from whom appears a spout of water as he prepares to dive.” Even for topiarists, it was extreme. Lenaghan-Balmer was thrilled: “It’s absolutely insane.”
Topiary in the form of smiling frogs and multipart “Moby-Dick” reconstructions can seem like an advanced case of English eccentricity, veering close to other, equally aestheticized and particular national pastimes, such as dressage and competitive dog shows. The royals and the aristocracy in England set the trend: some of the oldest topiaries in the country are the massive sculpted yew trees at Hampton Court, once the palace of Henry VIII. Today, King Charles III is renowned for elaborate garden projects at various of his houses, including a new topiary garden at the Norfolk estate of Sandringham. (This year, at the Chelsea Flower Show, alongside show gardens themed around forest bathing and Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” a major attraction was the unveiling of sculptures of the King and Queen’s terriers, Beth and Bluebell, woven out of willow.)
Topiary, however, is neither exclusively nor originally English. The Romans topiarized, as seen in the letters of Pliny the Younger, in which he wrote of animals, figures, and, embarrassingly, the letters of his own name cut out of boxwood at his Tuscan villa. Formal gardening enjoyed a revival during the Renaissance and thrived as a performance of wealth and power in France and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, contemporary Japanese cloud gardens are revered by topiary fans. America has its own offerings, too, such as the Topiary Park in Columbus, Ohio, populated by figures from Georges Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” The French have the historical edge, at least of topiary in its most exacting forms, with the grand formal gardens at the Palace of Versailles and swaths of rounded, bubbling topiary at the gardens of Marqueyssac. Topiarius is written in both English and French, and it is the French membership who set the tone at society gatherings, Hilliard said. As soon as the music started at a recent party, she told me, “the entire French aristocracy were grooving away.”
Still, the Brits, as ever, claim longevity. The self-proclaimed “oldest topiary gardens” in the world is at Levens Hall, in the Lake District, cared for by the head gardener, Chris Crowder, the eleventh person to hold the job since the garden was created in 1694. Fashions changed shortly thereafter, with formal gardens replaced by naturalistic parkland made popular by the eighteenth-century landscape designer Lancelot (Capability) Brown. The garden at Levens Hall, left intact, was allowed to grow into a population of around a hundred abstractly shaped topiaries, like a very mixed crowd at a garden party. Crowder has spent much of the past thirty-odd years clipping them into shape. To tell them apart, he has given them nicknames: Homer Simpson, Darth Vader, R2-D2.
Some fifteen years ago, Crowder decided to make his mark on the garden and planted some yews. He alone is allowed to tend them. “I wouldn’t want anyone to mess with my babies,” he explained. A sense of quasi-parental ownership is common among topiarists. “Every person is like his topiaries,” Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, an eminent English garden designer, told me. Spend long enough tending a plant and it starts to reflect your personality. Every gardener, like every parent, has their own style: there are those who allow their topiaries to grow into abstract forms or elephants, and those who prefer precisely measured triangles arranged in ruthless symmetry.
At Pitshill, Harrie Carnochan, the favorite to win the professional category of the Topiary Awards, had sculpted neat rows of holm oaks into perfect spheres and shaved symmetrical yew and boxwood hedges until they were hard-edged walls. Striving for perfection was a draw of the job, Carnochan told me. Oaks and yew would naturally grow into huge trees, the kind you can walk inside, great cathedrals of leaves. “We’re trying to control them,” he said. “I do like that side of things.” In any case, a vision of tamed nature is evidently the desire of Pitshill’s owner, Charles Pearson, the younger son of the Third Viscount Cowdray. (In “The Topiary Garden,” a children’s story by Janni Howker, an old gardener complains that his working life tending topiaries has been spent “turning what’s natural into what’s unnatural, just for the pleasing of a gentleman’s eye.”)
But no garden is quite what it seems. Capability Brown’s “natural” landscapes were feats of engineering that took years to build. (To create the lake at Blenheim Palace, Brown’s workers had to dig out, flood, and then dam an entire valley.) To create a wildflower meadow today, Hilliard reminded me, usually requires extensive design and costly work to manage native weeds that, left to their own devices, would take over. Topiary, on the other hand, might appear artificial, but, as several topiarists expressed to me, if not too tightly clipped, it can provide an evergreen refuge for birds and their nests. As with people, wilderness can lurk beneath the neatest of exteriors.
About half an hour from the coastal Scottish city of Aberdeen, the roads gradually narrow and wooded hills rise. After turning a sharp corner, I found myself driving alongside a parade of green creatures, including the “Moby-Dick” magnum opus and enormous sculptures of a man and a woman, cut out of yew. As I pulled up to the accompanying cottage, pretty but utterly upstaged by its hedge, I was met by smaller versions of the topiary man and woman: David and Susie Hawson.
David Hawson—who has the slim, stretched look of a silver birch—planted the hedge not long after he and Susie moved into the cottage, in the late nineteen-seventies. Cattle from the neighboring farm kept wandering down the lane and into the garden. They needed a barrier but didn’t want a fence. Hawson was the local doctor, Susie a nurse: they spent their lives tending to the local community. Fences, they felt, were a visual statement: “Keep out. We’re not that kind.”
