To a great extent the general management of young trees is altogether
different from the management required to be given to old trees;
inasmuch as the difficulties are more numerous, and the care and
attention necessary to be bestowed on them more manifold. Our
forefathers with the greatest skill and care laid out and formed the old
established Topiary gardens of the present day, and afterwards year by
year trained and shaped the fine old specimens of the Topiary art now to
be seen in some of the old gardens, so that when a person is walking
through one of these gardens, and examining the quaint and curious
shapes of the trees, he cannot fail to admire them and to reflect upon
the amount of skill and labour that has been bestowed on them. It would
be curious, indeed, if he failed to pause, and consider the amount of
patience the gardeners of earlier years were endowed with. In many
respects the gardener of the present time has the advantage in Topiary
work at least over his brother of one or two hundred years ago. Whether
the gardeners of the present day are more skilled in that special art,
is a question which I am not prepared to answer; but I am certain that
there is no mistaking the abilities of the old gardeners in the art of
training trees. The work they have left behind them proves this beyond a
doubt. The gardener of the present day has more variety of shapes to
choose from, and a larger and more varied selection of trees to work
upon.
If the trees were a good size and well grown when they were planted, the
work of clipping and training them may be commenced the following year,
according to the shape into which it is intended to form the tree. It is
not advisable that any clipping or training be done to the trees the
same autumn or winter that they are planted. It should be deferred until
the following autumn, in order to allow of fresh root action taking
place. Some of the trees can be clipped into certain shapes when they
are quite small; but for other shapes a much larger tree is necessary to
commence work upon. It is a very wise policy to go to a little extra
expense on the original outlay of the trees, rather than buy small trees
that will be of no use whatever for the work for which they are
ultimately intended.
If the suggestion that I made in a previous chapter has been acted upon,
viz., the buying in of the required number of trees some years before
the work of making the garden is taken in hand, and bringing them on in
the home nursery beds until they have become a suitable size, and until
the time arrives when they are required for planting in their permanent
places in the garden, the actual cost of the trees will be reduced to a
minimum, and better and more suitable trees secured than if they had
been purchased direct from some of the nurserymen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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