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.”
EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VIEW OF LORD HAMILTON’S GROUNDS NEAR THE THAMES ]
Evelyn, the celebrated diarist, who lived throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century, and just over five years of the eighteenth, strongly censured the prevalent method of clipping fruit trees into regular form, as well he might, but he claimed to be the first to bring the yew into fashion for hedges, declaring it to be “as well for a defence as for a succedaneum to cypress, whether in hedges or pyramids, conic spires, bowls or what other shapes.” And further he adds, “I do again name the yew, for hedges, preferably for beauty and a stiff defence, to any plant I have ever seen.” Evelyn’s residence from 1652 to 1694 was Sayes Court, Deptford, a home made famous to students of history because of its occupation by Peter the Great, of Russia, in 1698, to whom it was sub-let by Admiral Benbow. Peter the Great did not take the same care of the garden as Evelyn had taken, and his destruction, in part at least, of a famous holly hedge, caused the owner to regard the Russian Czar as a “right nasty tenant.” An old writer informs us, with reference to Sayes Court, that Evelyn had “a pleasant villa at Deptford, a fine garden for walks and hedges, and a pretty little greenhouse with an indifferent stock in it. He has four large round philareas, smooth clipped, raised on a single stalk from the ground, a fashion now much used. Part of his garden is very woody and shady for walking; but not being walled, he has little of the best fruits.”
The beginning of the end was not now far to seek. One of our greatest modern landscape gardeners, Mr H. E. Milner, has written: “Precise designs of clipped box and yew are not out of place, if the building has a character that is consonant with such an accompaniment.” Not satisfied with a few clipped trees in suitable positions, or with a part of the garden devoted to examples of Topiary, owners and gardeners alike, in the times I have briefly reviewed, seemed to have laboured to fill their gardens with illustrations of geometric figures, in box or yew; with the quaintest patterns and weirdest shapes, caricaturing birds and beasts, and imitating architecture and things of common use. Distorted vegetation met the eye everywhere, and there was little of the natural and beautiful to relieve the general monotony. It was the excessive use of Topiary that led to its own downfall and caused Batty Langley to ask, “Is there anything more shocking than a stiff, regular garden?”