The garden was designed with views and vistas in all directions, usually signalled by a piece of statuary strategically placed either within or without the bounds of the garden, to draw the eye. Restoration work was required on all of these vistas, but by far the most urgent was on the North side of the property, where two lines of yew trees, calculated to frame the view, had grown to such proportions as to obscure it instead. Not only that, but they had become unstable on the poor soil and one had already blown over, and had had to be winched up from where it had prostrated itself on the lawn, and lashed to the yew tree behind it in the row. This had been done before my arrival. Don't forget, there had been a bit of a hurricane in 1987 in the south of England, followed by another in 1990, while I was conveniently further north. The problem was that tying one tree to another was not a clever solution to the situation, since this simply placed a second tree under stress, and made it all the more likely that it, too, would fall over in protest.
We had a couple of meetings between myself, the Gardens Adviser and my boss, where we skirted round the conundrum without arriving at a conclusive strategy. It was clear to me that there was only one tactic that would work, but it was one that everyone was scared of because of the potential reaction from the public. No one wanted to incite an outcry. Except me, apparently. I argued solidly on behalf of severely reducing the whole stand of trees on both sides of the view, and heard tentative agreement from the others present. They went away, obviously with the impression that we had held the decision in abeyance for a subsequent meeting. Now, no one likes working for a despot. That's why I opted to donate my labours to charitable organisations rather than private owners. However, the endless waiting for committee approval holds everything back, and you find yourself marking time, achieving little while awaiting a decision, when you are ready with the labour and resources to get on and get the job done. Knowing that, in principle, we were in accord about what needed to be done, I went ahead and did it.
I found out much later that this triggered a series of memos, which bounced back and forth amongst higher management up to Regional Director level, giving clear instruction to watch me like a hawk, as I was showing myself to be a loose cannon, whose admirable exuberance was potentially dangerous. I leave you to make up your own minds on the evidence of the photographs I am about to show.
I have no better evidence to display, unfortunately, but this was a serious mess that needed to be sorted out. As is evident here from this close view, the urn is the focal point, lined up by eye, as measurement would have placed it badly, on the front door of the house and the main drive in to the property. All that you can see belonged to the estate, with the exception of the narrow strip of green field just visible at the top of the view. The urn was meant to sit centrally within the vista created by two double rows of yew trees, one on each side of the lawn. The yew trees, which no doubt worked for ten, maybe even twenty years had begun long ago to encroach on the view, and no one had either known what to do about it, or wanted to tackle the work. The result of that was that the trees had become unstable, and had narrowed the lawn down considerably, pinching the view till it almost wasn't there at all. Gardeners had come along, and not out of any sense of sympathy for the design implications of all this, I suspect, but simply because it was becoming difficult to mow the lawn, had begun to hedge the yew trees up as far as they could reach with a pair of loppers. The consequence of that was that we now had the straight sides up to about nine or ten feet, with the weighty top growth pulling the trees inwards and dropping under their own weight till they almost sat upon the urn, leaving it for most of the day in shadow, and not doing its job as a focal point. You must also imagine that this problem extended, on the right-hand side of the picture a further 30 or 40 metres back, and viewed from the front of the house, where it was designed to be seen from, it looked even more enclosed owing to changing levels in the drive.
I made the decision to prune the double row of yews such that the back row was taken down to 12' high and the front row reduced to 11'. This involved removing all side growth and retaining only the main stems that rose vertically. This significant weight reduction immediately added stability to the tree that had collapsed, and gave it half a chance of recovering.
The ideal time to do such severe pruning of any evergreen subject is just before the sap starts to rise in April. Evergreens need a certain amount of foliage to keep going through the winter, as they do not go completely dormant like deciduous subjects. If you take all that off too early, when it is unable to regenerate, then you weaken the plant and maybe kill it. If you time it right, the tree will start to put out new growth immediately, and will have the whole season to clothe itself in preparation for the following winter. In this case, I took a calculated risk. Knowing that by April, when we would reopen to the public we would be too busy, I got us started on the job in late January and early February. The result was shocking, I admit, particularly as this was one of the first sights a visitor would see on entering the property, but it cured the problem in the long run. It also threatened my job security in the short term, and earned me a reputation as a butcher in some quarters. I could live with that, because I knew what I was doing. And I was confident that the strategy would prove itself in years to come.
At first we did not tackle all the trees, just the most unstable ones. The effect was like this:
As you can see, we mulched the area copiously with mushroom compost to keep weeds down and improve the soil. I then awaited the onslaught, which was plentiful. The point now needs to be made, that no one achieves anything in gardening without courage and a willingness to take informed risks. You have, like in most creative disciplines, to learn the rules so you can forget them and follow your instinct. Within two years whiskers had grown back, as can be seen below:
Yet even three years on, we hadn't had the chance to complete the job to include all of the trees that needed work, and you can still see how obscure the view was as seen from the top of the drive -
From within the pruned area, it now looked like this, and as you can see, I had put in a planting of 1200 Digitalis 'Sutton's Apricot', an attractive foxglove grown from seed, in an attempt to make the area more attractive to visitors while the growth slowly regenerated.
Also, the odd tree had been lost through the years of neglect and new young plants had been inserted into the gaps.
By the next year, the foxgloves had seeded.They are naturally promiscuous, and had reverted to mixed wild colours. I had acquired a new volunteer in the garden by this time, whom I put to weeding in amongst the seedlings. This person was a mature horticultural student, so I assumed a certain amount of understanding of the process, which turned out to be totally unjustified. When I inspected the area afterwards, I found that the weeding had been done in circles from the midst of the tender, very soft seedlings, trampling discs 18" in diameter before moving one step away and trampling another ring to death. What a mess. Which leads me to say again, there is a need to adopt proper techniques for even the most basic tasks in a garden, and it is more than likely that what most people do in their own gardens isn't really up to the mark. I will explain weeding later when it feels appropriate.
Ten years on, the trees had regrown considerably, and I had had time to consider how to treat them, to prevent the same degeneration in the future. A gardener's mind ticks slowly sometimes, particularly when it is constantly being distracted by other more pressing matters. By this time, I had managed to acquire a completely new team who were superb, and quite possibly one of the most productive garden teams, pound for pound, in the country. At 6'1" I was the little guy.
I had been wrangling internally, for a whole decade, about how to deal with the trees once they had recovered. Given the dictates of apical dominance, trees are always going to get taller, within the constraints of their genes. They also tend to get wider. I needed to come up with something which by its very nature would not always have the tendency to encroach in perpetuity. I baulked at the idea of another tall straight-sided hedge. That was all very well, and we were good at maintaining those, but we already had one and a half kilometres of formal hedging in the garden, as well as 143 separate items of geometric topiary at the time, cones, cubes, obelisks, spheres etc., in all sizes from huge to sensible, so I didn't want to add to that. The decision I made was, having seen some of the ancient yew hedges in very old gardens, tumbling and cascading in random billows from great heights, and having also witnessed Japanese cloud-pruning and mountain-replicating effects, that I wanted these background trees to become free-form works of art. I dropped the brief on the team and asked them to get creative. They did a job which reached, if not surpassed, all my expectations. The fine gent in the picture is now Head Gardener there, and I am very pleased to have been able to hand it on to someone so dedicated and capable.
I also took on an apprentice in my final years there, now a permanent member of the team. He was and still is, an admirable asset and all round good guy. He sent me the photo below recently. It shows how the area has developed over time. I am so proud to have been able to set that in motion, even at such risk to my job in the early days!
That will never encroach on the vista again. Not as long as there are gardeners.
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