We are returning to that first summer in this, my career-defining and most challenging job. We have come through the changes to the spring and summer bedding, and followed them through to their final stage under my control fifteen years later. We have seen the severe pruning to the yew trees and their present day quirky, whimsical, undulating beauty. We have looked at turf maintenance and environmental concerns, upgrades to equipment. An awful lot has been set in motion. Now comes hedging, or at any rate one aspect of topiary.
The hedges throughout the garden were the pride and joy of the senior man on my team, and in truth he took great care over them. His thing was hedge maintenance and lawn mowing. He was in no way a plantsman, and had limited knowledge of plant names. On the other hand, both members of my inherited team did have excellent knowledge of traditional techniques and were well-versed in subjects such as growing Chrysanthemums in pots and nurturing pot plants for display indoors, neither of which we needed to do any more, as that was now the responsibility of the gardener employed by those who occupied the house. Nor did they have any need to exercise their vegetable-growing muscles any longer, as we had no one to feed and no walled garden to feed them from.
Anyway, because I was very wary about treading on anyone's toes, I left the hedges to my colleague, resolving to make the adjustments that I deemed necessary when he retired in five years time. In the meantime, they still looked good enough and attracted plenty of admiration when freshly cut. I had more important things to worry about right now, and those involved the areas where my team did not show particular aptitudes.
For that reason, I intend to talk about Irish Yews. Known by the Latin name of Taxus baccata 'Fastigiata', this is the upright version of the species, commonly planted in churchyards. It is all too often that people plant these after seeing young specimens, and assume that they will maintain a narrowly conical shape in perpetuity. Such folly. Don't be misled by the term 'fastigiate'. It is true that it means that it has an upright habit of growth, but that does not mean that it never gets wider. Each year it puts out vertical growth from buds on the outside of the plant, and inevitably this makes the tree slowly, imperceptibly wider with each season's development. After a few years it has grown well beyond the scale intended for it, and no one knows what to do with it. Left alone, it will look like this:
That is 25 - 30 feet tall and at least half as wide. It is a fine thing in the right place. But what we had was two plantings in a formal style, one on the west and one on the east side of the garden. The east side was slightly less rigidly laid out, but the west consisted of, if I remember correctly, 30 trees, arranged in two rows of 15, I'm no longer sure. In all we had 40 of these over the two areas. The western arrangement formed a vista over a sundial into open parkland, and was planted such that the yews were 12' apart in the rows, the rows were also 12' from each other, and the trees were 12' in height. This was a very carefully planned scene. No fault with the design, then, just a problem with the maintenance. By the time the garden had come to the organisation in a legacy, these were already well on the way to ruin. In true deference to tradition, the training they had been given was to follow the unwise words of the old masters and to tie in new growth from the outside of the plants, with string, back to the centre, hoping by so doing to narrow the crowns to form a conical shape. Look at the photo above. The natural shape the plant aspires to is not a cone, but a tulip-shaped cup. Imagine tying that in. Remember also that yew trees can live to 1000 years or more. That's a long time to strain against the leash. Over a period of only fifty of these years, this avenue had strained as far as it could and exceeded the bounds of its intention.
The resulting intervention also followed the ancient wisdoms, and involved cutting out the central leader to make room to tie in the excessive growth that was now forming each year on the outside. Again this is unwise counsel, as removing the central core leaves the tree unstable, with nothing rigid to tie into. The upshot now was that the entire ensemble would sway in the wind, the strings would burst, and eventually long whippy branches would fall across the walkway between and impede the vista. The cones, such as they were, did not really justify the name, while some leaned sickly into the middle and others outwards, and failed the duty they had as a framework to the vista. Prior to my arrival, the solution advised had been to climb up with fencing wire, ring the trees tightly with it to hold them together and let the foliage grow around it eventually to hide it. Unfortunately, this only prevented odd branches from escaping and prostrating themselves. It did not prevent entire trees from taking a strong lean in whatever direction the weight or prevailing wind suggested, as, without a rigid centre, there was nothing to stop them from wavering in any direction they pleased. It also caused damage to the bark, as it rubbed incessantly against the wires in the buffeting of the wind. What I came to was this, photographed on a calm day, ragged, uneven, scarcely conical and encroaching on the central vista -
I took a look at them, and wondered why it had never occurred to anyone that if the English Yew could be pruned into a hedge, then so could the Irish Yew. It was just a question of mastering the technique, which would inevitably have to be different because of the upright growth.
In this garden, at the time, before I revised the hedge maintenance a few years down the line, hedgecutting was always done in August, lingering on into September. During this period hardly any work was done in the garden other than one and a half days each week spent mowing, with the remaining three and a half days reserved for hedgecutting. That is minus the three tea breaks and lunch, and the early dart to feed pheasants, of course!
Tomorrow, I intend to show you the solution I found to the conundrum of making a cone out of a tulip. As if I wasn't already under suspicion of insanity for removing all the foliage from that big planting of yews that I showed you before, I was about to lay myself open to being sectioned. But in a way, it was my means of showing that I had the wherewithal to create formal shapes with hedging, without actually insulting anybody on the team by taking their work from them. Roll on tomorrow, when I shall describe the lunacy which gives all great works their edge!
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