Topiary gardening reached its height during the reign of William and Mary (1689–1702). William III., Prince of Orange, brought with him a taste for clipped yews, and also for elaborately designed iron gates and railings. He accentuated the prevailing taste. Turning again to Johnson, we find garden design “was now rendered still more opposed to nature by the heavy additions of crowded hedges of Box, Yew, etc., which, however, by rendering the style still more ridiculous, perhaps hastened the introduction of a more natural taste which burst forth later.” Some further idea of the prevalence of clipped trees is obtained from Celia Fiennes, who, in her chronicles of a journey “Through England on a Side Saddle in the time of William and Mary,” makes frequent reference to alleys of clipped trees and to yew and cypress cut into “severall forms.” William III. commenced the Kensington Gardens, and to alter a disfiguring gravel pit he employed the services of those famous Brompton nurserymen, London and Wise. In our time such a spot would in all probability be converted into a dell, with water and rock gardens, but London and Wise erected a mimic fortification, making the bastions and counterscarps of clipped yew and variegated holly. That this production was “long an object of wonder” can be easily understood, though whether it was one for “admiration” is open to question, notwithstanding that it had many admirers and was known as the “Siege of Troy.” Vegetable sculpture seems now to have reached its limit of popularity and design. Hazlitt, in his “Gleanings in old Garden Literature,” hits off the situation admirably when he writes: “But it was to the Hollanders that London and his partner were indebted for that preposterous plan of deforming Nature by making her statuesque, and reducing her irregular and luxuriant lines to a dead and prosaic level through the medium of the shears. Gods, animals, and other objects were no longer carved out of stone; but the trees, shrubs and hedges were made to do double service as a body of verdure and a sculpture gallery.” [Illustration: EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VIEW OF LORD HAMILTON’S GROUNDS NEAR THE THAMES ]