History of Topiary

The History and Mythology of Topiary and Baytrees

• The History of Topiary
  

• The History & Mythology of Laurus nobilis 'Bay Tree'

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Topiary is the fascinating and extraordinary art of cutting trees and shrubs into quaint and imaginative shapes. It derives from Topiarius, and originally had a much wider meaning, referring to ornamental gardening in general. Its Latin roots give us a clue as to the great antiquity of the craft, and indeed, the history of topiary is as long as that of gardening itself. The dictates of fashion or the need for economy may have affected topiary's popularity, but whenever there has been the opportunity and luxury to indulge in plants for ornament, then topiary has never been far away. It has had an enduring appeal, and we need to go far back in time to discover its origins.

Ancient Egypt

A papyrus, from 1340-1300BC, showing a symmetrical arrangement of palms and conical trees.

Ancient Rome

In the restored garden of the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, Clipped box bushes have been replaced exactly where the roots of the original plants remained after the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.

The first written descriptions of topiary come from the Romans. Pliny the Elder ascribes its discovery to Gnaius Mattius, a friend of the Emperor Augustus. That dates its first appearance to somewhere between 38 BC and 14 AD. It is likely, however, that the cutting and shaping of trees and shrubs had been absorbed from earlier Mediterranean and Asiatic cultures.
Whatever its earliest beginnings, by the end of the 1st century AD, topiary was a familiar and natural embellishment of the gardens of the wealthy. Pliny the Younger (AD 62-110) in Letters, describes the gardens of his villa in Tuscany as being, "embellished by various figures, and grounded with a box hedge, from which you descend by an easy slope, adorned with the representation of divers animals in box, answering alternately to each other: this is surrounded by a walk enclosed with tonsile evergreens shaped into a variety of forms. Behind it is the Gestatio laid out in the form of a circus, ornamental in the middle with box, cut into numberless different figures, together with a plantation of shrubs prevented by the shears from running too high; the whole is fenced in by a wall, covered with box, rising in differing ranges to the top." He adds, "...the box is cut into a thousand different forms: sometimes into letters expressing the name of the master: sometimes that of the artificer: whilst here and there little obelisks rise intermixed alternately with fruit trees..."
This is a fascinating description of a garden adorned with the most
fantastic forms, and interestingly, although the gardener would have been a slave, he was regarded highly enough to have his name immortalised in box hedge.
As the Roman Empire spread through the known world, the colonists brought with them many of the refining elements of their civilisation. Palaces and villas sprang up in the occupied lands in imitation of those at home, and archeological investigations have revealed their formal gardens and the remains of box, still as important today for topiary as it was then.

Mediaeval Times

St Osyth Priory, 12 miles south of Colchester dates back to pre 650 AD and as well as boxhedges has a 400 year old walled garden.

The collapse of the Roman Empire (from about the 4th century AD) ushered in the era known as the Dark Ages. This was a long period of social chaos during which life was a basic struggle for food and survival. The pleasures of civilisation were almost completely swept away.
It appears that only in the monasteries and safe within castle walls was the art of ornamental gardening maintained. Documentary evidence is scarce, but topiary, in its most stylised form survived, and can occasionally be glimpsed in the background of illuminated manuscripts and other illustrations of the period.

The Italian Renaissance

The bold design of the Renaissance Topiary garden at Castello Balduino depends entirely for its effect on simply carved blocks or yew.

Stability increased, so once again gardens were developed for pleasure and to reflect the wealth and power of their owners. This was the era of rebirth known as the Renaissance, and had its roots in Italy in the 14th century.
The period looked back to classical times and texts for its inspiration, as the resulting gardens showed. The gardens of Villa Lante, Bagnaia; Castello Balduino, Montalto di Pavia; and the Villa Garzoni, near Collodi in Tuscany, still exist today and all reflect the influence of the Renaissance in their box parterres, clipped hedges, and topiary work.
Leone Alberti's design for a villa in Florence, built in 1459, expressed the passion for cutting and training of plants. It included topiary "spheres, porticoes, temples, vases, urns, apes, donkeys, oxen, a bear, giants, men and women, warriors, a witch, philosophers, popes and cardinals,".
With time, the Renaissance's influence gradually spread throughout Europe.

France

The Restored Gardens of Vaux-le-Viconte
André Le Notre created this extraordinary garden for a villa in France and also created a similar Topiary garden for Louis XIV at Versailles in 1662. His main objective was the design and to create the garden without allowing the countryside to be obscured. This was a massive undertaking and required a knowledge of Civil engineering as well as gardening and Topiary skills.

In France the emphasis was increasingly on box hedges. The gardens were a combination of hedges: low, in complex patterns known as parterres, and high for emphasising and enclosing vistas. Topiary was used strictly for architectural emphasis and structure in designs.
This style culminated in Le Notre's late 17th-century scheme at Versailles for King Louis XIV. Massive clipped box parterres were created and long-hedged vistas stretched for miles. The garden was a representation of the Monarch's absolute authority over both people and landscape, and reputedly cost over two billion francs.

England

The 'Mon Plaisir' garden in the grounds of Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, designed between 1830 and 1850, made extravagant use of Topiary. (Picture from E. A. Brooke's The Gardens of England.)

In England, an earlier fascination for mazes and labyrinths kept the art of clipping alive. Alongside the traditional hedges and arbours there now developed the Tudor knot garden -- a low, intricate, intertwined parterre of dwarf hedging.
The Duke of Buckingham in 1502 is recorded as having made special payments to his gardeners for "diligence in making knots and for clipping of knots."
Ornamental and bizarre topiary was also very popular; a 17th century poet describing his vision of the perfect garden, "Of rosemary, cut out with curious order, in satyrs, centaurs, whale and half-men-horses and a thousand other counterfeited courses."
The art of clipping became increasingly popular, and by the early 17th
century complex designs were commonplace. William Lawson gave these
instruction in 1618, "...your gardener can frame your lesser wood to the shape of men armed in the field, ready to give battle; of swift-running hounds to chase the deer or hunt the hare."

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The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, the increasing wealth of the Dutch merchant class, and the introduction of new plants through their trading links around the world, encouraged a great passion for gardening. Land in Holland was always valuable, much of it having been reclaimed with difficulty from the sea, so gardens were by necessity of a smaller scale. They relied on formal ornaments for effect: gates, railings, simple parterres, and especially topiary. The Dutch enthusiasm for shaped evergreens went far beyond their use as restrained, geometrical, architectural elements such as cones, spheres, cubes and columns. Their small gardens were packed with green sculpture, including people, animals, birds and also more abstract forms.

Topiary's Golden Age
When William of Orange came from Holland to take the British throne after the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, he brought with him a fanaticism for clipped greens. When placed alongside the already thriving English garden tradition, the stage was set for a craze that was to be later known as "Topiary's Golden Age."
It was at this time that the world famous garden at Levens was created,
containing intricate and bizarre topiary. This and countless other gardens were established by their enthusiastic owners following the fashion of the time.
Formal gardens and topiary in the Dutch style spread throughout England, and gardens were crammed with an extravagant assortment of "giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms, and mottoes in Yew, Box and Holly," noted Horace Walpole. Everywhere it seemed, "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 as a sculpture gallery,".

The English Revolt
The fashion had been taken to its extreme, and the inevitable reaction
occurred.
It was spearheaded not by royalty, nobility, or even the garden designers.
This time it was writers and philosophers who would change the course of garden history.
In 1712, Joseph Addison wrote in The Spectator: "Our British gardeners on the contrary, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes and pyramids. We see the mark of the scissors on every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure..."
Alexander Pope's 1713 essay in The Guardian entitled Verdant Sculpture added another blow. "We seem to make it our study to recede from nature, not only in various tonsure of greens into the most regular and formal shapes but even in monstrous attempts beyond the reach of the art itself. We run into sculpture and are yet better pleased to have our trees in the awkward figures of men and animals than in the most regular of their own."
The result of these and other attacks, and the wider debate at the time
about the nature of beauty, was the beginning of a great purge of the "Dutch style."
Before long, the reaction was every bit as extreme as the fashion which it set out to replace. Under the garden designers Bridgeman, Kent and Lancelot "Capability" Brown, topiary and formal gardens were ripped out and burned to allow for a more pastoral landscape, where the emphasis was on lakes and groupings of trees.

A Return To Favour
By the end of the 18th century the penchant for the picturesque vista had become overpowering. In 1772 Sir William Chambers apparently warned that, "unless the mania were not checked, in a few years longer there would not be found three trees in a line from Land's End to the Tweed."
The 19th century saw a very gradual return to the formal, Italianate style of garden design and, along with it, the use of topiary. A more balanced view allowed for clipped hedges and shaped trees closer to the house, to reflect its architectural features. Again, there was a "wild garden" backlash, but never again were the two approaches so polarised.

America

At the Walter Hunnewell Arboretum in Wellesley, Massachusetts, European and Oriental styles are blended.

North America also has its tradition of topiary. Although the first
settlers could not indulge in the luxury of ornamental gardening, by the 18th century, formal, European-style gardens were being created. They included elements of topiary and they have remained a feature of American gardens ever since.
This century has seen the establishment of some of the finest garden
collections: Green Animals, Rhode Island; The Ladew Topiary Garden,
Maryland; and Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania. It is, however, the "New
Topiary," wire-framed structures over which ivies or similar plants are
trained, that puts North America at the forefront of modern topiary
development.

Today and Tomorrow
We have faster, more mobile lifestyles than we did, and although this does not always fit in with a craft or hobby taking time and patience to perfect, there is an ongoing revival in the art of topiary.
It maybe nostalgia, a sentiment common to every generation, that explains our interest, or it may also be the visual impact topiary creates.
Unmistakably, it makes a statement and is, perhaps, a reaction to the
pretty, pastel, naturalistic and standardised gardening of recent years.
Topiary comes across well in the media of our times and looks stunning,
whether in magazines, illustrated books, or on television.
Finally, its style is well suited to today's smaller gardens, bridging the gap between the rigid architecture of the house, and unstyled plantings of the yard.

In Conclusion
Although topiary is one of the most ancient garden crafts, it endures
because there's something inherently satisfying in the labours of creation and aesthetically pleasing about the results. There is always new inspiration, and coupled with the interest in the "New Topiary," it will fascinate, charm and delight for many years to come.

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