In the Topiary garden, the variety of shapes that it is possible to
train are so many and varied that I will only give a few of those that
can either be copied from the old gardens, or formed from the
Topiarist’s own ideas. In the first instance, there are the various
shapes of the figures required in the game of chess. Birds of any
description are easy to form into shape in either yew or boxwood. When
they are well trained and properly shaped, nothing has a better
appearance in the Topiary garden than the various shapes of birds. The
shaping of animals is more difficult to manage; but I have seen some
good specimens, notably a lion and crown, the Howard crest, that we have
got in the garden here at Levens. Then there are the various other
shapes that are to be found in the old Topiary gardens, such as
barristers’ wigs, Indian wigwams, summer-houses, helmets, busbys,
bottles of almost any description or size, umbrellas, hats or spirals of
various forms. These may be either trained as single trees, or formed
into arches. Among the newer shapes that I have seen, which have
recently been introduced into the Topiary art, are yachts, boats, jugs,
etc. The different sizes and shapes of jugs are so varied, that any
person who fancies the training of them in his garden need not lack
variety of form, and they are shapes that are, comparatively speaking,
very easy to train. There are also a great many very pretty shapes that
can be formed out of the yew or the boxwood tree without being intended
to represent anything in particular, further than that they are trained
and shaped simply as ornaments to help to add further to the
embellishment of the garden.
It is not my intention to try to explain the various ways of training
all the different shapes I have pointed out. That in itself would
require a chapter; as the different ways of training a yew or any other
tree are so numerous, to attain what is practically the same end, that
the person responsible for the work will have to be guided greatly by
circumstances and according to the particular tree he has got to work
upon. In every Topiary garden there should be at least four or five
different arches of various designs. There are very few things that are
more effective in any garden than a few well trained arches, and in the
Topiary garden, if they are not more effective than in the modern
garden, they are at any rate more in keeping with the general
surroundings of the place. If it has been decided to train several
arches in the garden, each one should be quite a different shape from
its neighbour. There is such a variety of different shapes to be seen in
almost any garden where arches are trained, that there is no occasion
for two arches in one garden to be similar in design.
[Illustration:
LEVENS GARDENS
UMBRELLA, INDIAN WIGWAM AND EAST WALK
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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