Taken in June after the hedges have started growing and are no longer as crisp as they were at the start of the spring, the whole effect is loose, natural and slightly untended.
It's fine, but I wanted more from it. I wanted to accentuate the contrast. It is from this that my revised approach to hedge maintenance came.
To clarify, I shall go into some of the mythology surrounding the art. I've heard plenty of it. Visitors always want to show off their knowledge. When talking to gardeners, they want to be one of the boys. So I've heard all manner of things. Such as, 'you should always cut box when it is damp after a shower - that stops it going brown', or, 'you should always use hand shears to cut box', or, 'the right time to cut box is once a year on St.Swithun's Day'. This latter is again somehow mystically connected with the promise of convenient rain. Wouldn't work for us anyway, because we had a month's worth of box hedging to cut, and it couldn't all be done on the same day.
Let's debunk these one at a time. It makes no difference whatsoever if the hedge is damp when you cut it. Look at it logically - you have a small glossy evergreen leaf which you slice through with your implement. Whatever the weather, it will go brown at the edges. It's called healing. It is like a scab forming. The leaf has to close itself off to prevent further evaporation of its life-force, so it dries out at the edge to keep the remainder green. Cutting in the rain has no effect on this.
Hand shears? Give me a break. Have you ever seen those ancient hedges from the 18th century, tumbling and cascading in lumps and bumps over walls, or beautiful pieces of large topiary which have long outgrown their original shape? How did they get to be like that? By growing year on year of course. Every year you make your cuts, and you have to leave a tiny amount of growth from this year, because it is impossible to cut back as far as the previous year. That stage has been superseded by this year's growth. So your hedge gets imperceptibly larger. After a hundred years it is way beyond its original intention. At some point, the branches become too long and heavy to support themselves in their original position, and begin to collapse under their own weight. Some of them sag, creating gaps. New growth forms in these gaps, the surface begins to undulate, a new topiary begins, a sort of ancient chic, which we come to love for its unruliness. And it is true, this can make a fine feature and gives many an older garden its character. But - if you want to create a sharp delineation that separates the formal from the informal by the use of hedges, than you must maintain them to be as crisp as possible for as long as possible. The advances in technology which brought us the mechanical hedgecutter allow for this. The machine can cut in much harder to the surface than the hand shears and can keep a hedge where you want it for far longer. Sad to say, that even with powerful petrol hedgecutters far too many gardeners are too timid to lay into their hedges properly, and I watch with despair while they restore their own work every few years because they have failed to control it by their annual maintenance regime. Once you have the shape you want you must hit it hard to retain it. No, that's not hard enough.
And St.Swithun's Day? So you are telling me that you should cut your hedges once a year, in mid-July. Come on! Have a think! That's even worse than the regime that I inherited of a single cut in August and September. At least that has the virtue of removing all of the year's growth and remaining tight through the winter. But St. Swithun's Day? This means you do your only and final cut when there is still a prolific period of growth to come. In other words, the plants have grown through the spring and looked fluffy and untidy, then you cut them, just in time to watch them respond immediately with new growth, which will keep them looking scruffy through the rest of the summer and the entire winter until starting into even more growth the following spring. Through the worst weather in the year, they will be big and loose and more susceptible to damage. And your hedges will only look as sharp as you planned them on one day a year - St.Swithun's Day!
No to all three of the myths. Emphatically no. Visitors deserve to see the garden at it its best at all times of the year. And this is why I decided to alter the regime to the benefit of both the hedges and the overall function of the garden - whole-garden philosophy, remember? It is obvious that the more times you cut a hedge each year, the less material there will be to cut each time. This means that a single cut once a year will take much longer than each of several cuts, which only involve nipping off a small amount of growth. Cumulatively, of course, several cuts will take longer, but the extra time may not be as significant as you might imagine. The first year I experimented with five cuts, and the results were dramatic. The point is that each cut stimulates new buds to break. One cut produces two new leaves. If you do that five times, then you are able to thicken up a hedge much quicker than when you rely on a single annual trim. As we had a lot of gaps, this was an important consideration. The second advantage was that by increasing the frequency I was able to have the hedges setting off the informal background plantings more precisely for the entire season. The object was to achieve that contrast, and that could be done best by aiming for it throughout the year, not just on St.Swithun's Day. Five cuts proved to be unnecessarily labour-intensive and I eventually settled on three as a general rule. This fulfilled my obligation to the garden and to the visitors, who were now able to see the garden looking as it should, whatever time of year they came to view it.
This is a picture of the area under cherry blossom, before the new regime started. Early enough in the season still to be looking neat, but just starting into the growth which in a month I would be removing.
The next phase, of seeing how it all progressed, will have to wait for another day.
No comments:
Post a Comment