Latest news with #topiary
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Voices: I've worked on my garden for 21 years – now I'm opening it up to the public
The National Garden Scheme I was a special event in a different context: No poetry haggled out of words, or art Coiled across the canvas and made shapes of. If King Charlies were to visit I could not have tried harder; The twenty-five who'd paid to examine my landscaping and topiary Were each as important as he. My held breath during a period Where not much was blooming, was released At the last minute flowering of six-foot-tall lilies That had unfurled their skirts of brightly coloured silks, The pink and crimson froths of the astilbes, The brilliant purple pourings of campanulas From gaps, nooks, crannies, flowerpots and cracks in pavers, Astrantia, dianthus, alstroemerias, lavender, linaria, Veronica And the first agapanthus. From the visual silence of many greens Sudden screams of colour blazed from the oddly made flowerbeds And strangely shaped pathways that I'd carved from a one-time field Into a map of the inside of my restless head. 'Oh, so beautiful,' they said, unable to imagine All the jobs left undone that were so evident to me And that I must finish before the second one.
The Independent
02-06-2025
- General
- The Independent
Ever wondered how to shape your evergreens? Experts share their tips
Topiary offers a unique way for plants to shape our gardens. Shaping plants into balls, pyramids and even birds doesn't have to be as complicated as it might seem, so you don't just have to admire topiary in the gardens of stately homes and horticultural shows. A new photographic exhibition, On The Hedge, opening at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, charts our relationship with hedges and topiary, from their role in shaping our landscapes and homes, to their environmental benefits. 'From a design point of view, topiary is really important, even if it's just a simple basic structure. A cube, or a cone, or even just a ball of some sort gives really good structure through the winter when a lot of gardens go quiet,' says RHS horticultural advisor, Nick Turrell. 'If your shape – it could be a simple cone or a cube – is repeated through a garden, the eye will immediately pick up on that repetition. In summer, it might just sit in the background but it still provides an important structural framework. 'Then in the winter it looks amazing because the frost sits on it.' Can you have topiary in a smaller gardens? 'Yes – it could be knee high, a cube or a dome and you could grow them in a border, like an exclamation mark among all the froth of the flowers. I've done it even in tiny little postage stamp-sized gardens, when you have two or three in the border which adds a good bit of solidity,' says Turrell. If you've only got room for a pot, put your evergreen in as big a pot as you can, which won't dry out as quickly as smaller containers, but be aware that it will require more TLC than if you plant it in a border, he advises. 'It will require a bit more attention. Any plant, whether it's clipped or not, is totally dependent on you for food and water. It will need feeding through the summer, ideally every three weeks. 'After the first season the potting compost will have run out of nutrients so it's down to you to feed it.' If the compost needs changing, the chances are you'll need to repot your topiary into a bigger pot. If you don't have room for that, it will need regular feeding and will benefit from mulching with some well-rotted manure in the autumn, he suggests. What are the best plants for topiary? Box blight and box tree caterpillar are still a real problem, so find an alternative, he suggests. His top three choices are yew, small-leaved privet and Wilson's honeysuckle (Lonicera nitida). 'With yew, you can have it whatever size you like, it always comes back and it has tiny needles, which lends itself to close clipping.' The small-leaved privet doesn't grow too tall – reaching around 1.5m if you let it – and is quite happy to be clipped, he says. Wilson's honeysuckle is strong-growing, with tiny leaves. You can grow it in a pot and if you occasionally forget to water it, it can bounce back, he says. Look at the size of the leaves of whichever plant you choose, because the bigger the leaf the worse it is to topiarise, he adds. 'You can end up cutting through a broad leaf halfway through when you are clipping it and then the ends can start fraying and going a bit brown, which doesn't look good.' Only buy one plant for each shape Don't plant, for instance, three of the same species next to each other hoping that they will be dense enough to give you a shape more quickly, because they will eventually end up fighting for space and light, he advises. 'If you're looking for a cone or a ball which is say, a metre high, you can buy them ready-made but they are expensive. If you buy a yew just as a plant, which is 60cm tall, it won't cost as much and as long as you are patient and feed and water it you can start trimming it once it reaches the size you want it to be. 'They will grow fairly quickly. Within 18 months – two seasons – you should start to see the beginnings of the shape, if it's not too intricate, like a cockerel.' 'Keep it simple. A good pair of sharp shears or even some little handheld long-nosed snips are perfect. Don't worry about electric hedge trimmers – it's the difference between using an electric shaver and a razor blade. You get a much better finish with a sharp pair of shears or long-nosed snips. 'Using those tools also encourages you to look carefully at what you are doing, whereas electric hedging shears are a bit slapdash.' Put a frame over the plant – you can buy shaped frames at garden centres and topiary specialists. Anything that grows outside the frame can be clipped to get the shape you want. Position the frame over the top of the plant after you've planted it. They are like a plant support. Once the plant has grown and you have achieved your desired shape, you can remove the frame, or leave it in place as a marker, especially if it is an intricate shape, he suggests. Beginners might start with easy cones or cubes, but you can progress to cloud shapes, birds and animals. There's no hard and fast rule about when to trim but it would normally be in spring or autumn, depending on how fast it grows, he says. Step back every few snips when you are trimming, to check on the shape and the perspective. 'If you cut off too much in one section, you'll probably need to cut the whole lot down to that size,' he suggests. 'It's not the end of the world, it just delays the ultimate size that you want.' If you buy a plant which is already shaped, take a picture of it at the outset, so that if it starts growing fast, you can see what shape it looked like at the start. If you want your topiary to inhabit your flower borders, don't be afraid of planting your colour close to the topiary, which will create a contrast between a crisp, shaped evergreen and a froth of flowers, he says. If you want your topiary to be a stand-alone showstopper in, say, a lawn, don't plant anything nearby which will take away its prima donna status, he suggests.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Our Favorite Gardens
A boxwood parterre with topiary and roses, bordered by lemon trees, in front of the manor house of Condes de Santar e Magalhães in central Portugal. Read more here. In the gardens of the creative director Richard Christiansen's Los Angeles home, Flamingo Estate, a fountain filled with Cara Cara oranges from the organic fruit farm Ken's Top Notch Produce. Read more here. A view of the peony beds in the garden of the English floral designer Milli Proust's 17th-century home in the Sussex countryside. The fencing is made from coppiced chestnut and hazel. Read more here. The photographer Bill Henson turned the former parking lot next door to his studio in the Northcote suburb of Melbourne, Australia, into a botanical garden. Read more here. Allium, foxglove, chives, alchemilla and roses grow in the designer Jasper Conran's tangled garden in Dorset, England. Read more here. A view of the Atlantic Ocean from the writer and horticulturist Umberto Pasti's garden, Rohuna, an hour's drive south of Tangier. Read more here. A rooftop garden on Paris's Rue Vieille du Temple that the landscape architect Arnaud Casaus designed, featuring narrow-leaved mock privet, African lily, rosemary, Mediterranean spurge and Verbena bonariensis, among other plants. The Willy Guhl chairs are vintage. Read more here. At the end of a walking path near the actress Julianne Moore and the filmmaker Bart Freundlich's house in Montauk, N.Y., a stone bench by the artist Robert Gurr. Read more here. Standard trained white wisteria, climbing roses and Oriental poppies in the rose border of the writer Olivia Laing's home in Suffolk, England. Read more here. In the Brazilian landscape architect Isabel Duprat's Jardim Botânico in São Paulo, a low-lying cover of grama-amendoim is fringed by monarch ferns, St. Christopher's lily and purple taro, and shaded by towering Brazilian cedar. A sculpture by Franz Weissmann is visible, back right. Read more here. Louis Benech, France's most revered landscape designer, created the gardens at Mas Sainte-Anne, the home of François and Maryvonne Pinault outside St.-Tropez. More than 20 years later, the area is lush with lavender, Helichrysum petiolare and olive trees. Read more here. The cutting garden at Robin Hill, the art dealer Susan Sheehan and the rug trader John O'Callaghan's neo-Georgian mansion in Norfolk, Conn., is situated in a woodland clearing and includes a seasonally changing selection of perennials used for arrangements in the house. Read more here. The view from Robin Standefer's ceramics studio on the Montauk, N.Y., property she shares with her husband and design partner, Stephen Alesch, includes a large Tardiva hydrangea, Queen Anne's lace, cosmos and white yarrow. Read more here. The landscape designer Dan Pearson's expansive Somerset estate celebrates the English countryside. Here, an ornamental garden transitions seamlessly to a wildflower meadow, where Pearson and his longtime romantic partner and collaborator, Huw Morgan, walk along the mowed path. Read more here. More than 150 varieties of cactus, cultivated since the 1960s by the Thiemann family, grow on 17 desert acres outside of Marrakesh. Read more here. In the hills of southwest England, the writer Ian McEwan and his wife, the novelist Annalena McAfee, have added a joyfully unruly bed of foxglove, lady's mantle, iris, allium and meadow rue to one of the yew-hedge rooms on their nine-acre Cotswolds property. Read more here.
Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The expert's guide to topiary for your garden
'I've seen a man playing a piano in honeysuckle and full-scale racehorses,' says Michael Buck, head of horticulture at Creepers wholesale nursery in Surrey, and a judge for the Henchman Topiary Awards. One of his all-time favourite pieces was cut from 40 yew trees and stands four metres high. 'It looks like my grandma's blancmange mould. You walk inside and it's [like] a room. You could put beanbags in there and chill out.' Meanwhile, David Hawson, the winner in the home gardener category of the inaugural Henchman awards last year, had transformed his giant yew hedge into scenes from the novel Moby-Dick as well as various British birds. With topiary, the only limit is your imagination. Topiary is an ancient art but it is booming
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
How to create a country garden in the city, according to garden designer BUTTER WAKEFIELD
Butter Wakefield, 63, was always destined to be a garden designer. She grew up on a small arable farm outside Baltimore in the US, with ponies and horses. Her grandparents had a beautiful garden near Philadelphia, while her mother was a president of the local Garden Club of America. After working at Christie's in New York, then emigrating to London in 1988 to work as an assistant at the interiors company Colefax and Fowler, she realised being in the garden made her happiest. Wakefield took some short courses at The English Gardening School followed by a year-long diploma in plants and plantsmanship, before taking on her first garden design commission for a friend. In 1992, she moved to her Victorian villa in West London's Stamford Brook. The style of this garden echoes her professional work, spanning smart townhouse gardens in London and Bath, including schemes for interior designers Rita Konig and Matilda Goad, as well as larger country projects. The meadow of her own garden, a succession of spring flowers (including narcissi, cowslips and Geranium phaeum), has been such a hit, it's a frequent request from clients. Most of her gardens also include some forms of topiary. 'I have to have a clipped shape,' says Wakefield. 'What I like is chaos and lots of rich, multi-layered planting, but it only works if there is a strong framework of shrubs and clipped shapes to bring order to the abundant tangle. The topiary disappears into the background in summer, but in winter it holds the garden together.' That love of form is also plays out in structured evergreens and trees in pots; her back door is framed by standards of Myrtus communis pruned into neat balls and multistem Osmanthus x burkwoodii. In the centre, a steel water bowl, filled with a few oxygenating plants and gently trickling water, reflects the surrounding flowers but also provides a place for birds and insects to drink. Bringing in nature is central to Wakefield's ethos, and the garden is planted to offer early nectar with spring bulbs and climbing shrubs, including an ornamental quince, Chaenomeles speciosa 'Nivalis', which is trailed along the wall and flowers from late January. Feeders hang from trees, and one shady corner is left untouched, with leaf litter and decaying logs to provide insect habitats. One of Wakefield's favourite ideas was to enclose a utility area where she works – a small space with a potting bench, compost bin and shed – behind trellis panels covered with Trachelospermum jasminoides. In front of this, another layer is added with a small bench topped with an antique laundry basket, which is filled with tulips and various annuals each year. 'I come out and cut flowers for the house and for projects,' she says. 'I would be lost without it.' This is an edited extract from Wonderlands by Clare Coulson, Quadrille, £40. To order for £34 with free delivery until 25 May, go to or call 020 3176 2937 GET THE LOOK Inspired by Butter's garden? Here's everything you need to transform your own space Orange Tree Gold Metal Watering Can £18.50 Shop VegTrug Nesting Metal Plant Stands, Set of 3 £149.99 Shop Trug £24 Shop Gardening gloves £15.99 Shop Garden bucket bag £45 Shop Small Hand Trowel £26 Shop £15 Shop Habitat Checked Ceramic Footed Planter £8 Shop Niwaki Canvas Gardening Kneeler Pad, Natural £28 Shop Bind Scissors Cast Iron Black Large £10 Shop
