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We do n’t know who the first nurseryman was to look at a box shrub and see its privileged cube , but we do lie with that the impulse to clip plants into pleasing shapes fit back a long means . Those first topiary artists also foster something else — the abiding , perhaps the central , debate in garden intent : Is it finer to control nature or merely to emulate it ? Advocates of topiary laud not just the idea of flora sculpture , but the skill required to achieve and sustain it . depreciator have regarded topiary as portentous or at least childish .
Photo by : Denis Vrublevski / Shutterstock .
To purist , topiary is the training of vegetation , unremarkably broadleaf evergreen plant or coniferous tree , into geometric or representative forms . Often this involve develop selected shoots on telegram armature . Pliny the Elder , in the first centurya.d . , find topiary hunting scenes , armadas , and other industrial plant “ clipped into innumerable shapes , ” include letter spelling the nurseryman ’s or master ’s name . In Japan , clipped shrubbery contract its own iconic shape , as swarm - pruned azaleas or , in temple garden , as god .
In gain to box , the Romans used cypress , too raw for northern Europeans , who bend to yew , which went on to become the dominant cloth in New World topiary garden , such as the one at Longwood Gardens in southeastern Pennsylvania . There , approximately 50 topiaries are clipped in summer , after the one-year outpouring flush . This let gardener to keep the topiaries well shape while using novel maturation to make full in gaps have by winter storms .
As formal garden reached their zenith in the palace garden of seventeenth - hundred France , topiary became an integral element of this almost sacred court to the rationality of math . But who likes maths ? For English polemicists like Alexander Pope , the yew dagger served as a lightning perch . He spoof a sale notice of topiary , a “ catalogue of greens ” that include “ The Tower of Babel not yet finished … A pair of Giants , stunted , to be sell cheap ” and a “ quickset Hog , shot up into a hedgehog , by being forget a week in rainy conditions . ”
Or as his contemporary Joseph Addison compose , “ We see the stain of the Scissars upon every flora and Bush . ”
present-day landscape painting designer like Jacques Wirtz and Erik Dhont in Belgium and Dutch garden couturier Piet Oudolf sculpt hedges with a topiary - similar sensibility . For Oudolf , who excellently goes to town with herbaceous plants , it is the clip form that become an essential counterpoint to the dancing supergrass and perennial . “ It ’s the tenseness between the two that fascinates me , ” he says . Topiary , he maintains , is a relevant landscape feature film that is not at all stuck in the past . “ Control is something cryptic in human being , ” he says . “ Topiary will always be there . It ’s the ultimate form of control . ”
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