1 8 THE BOOK OF TOPIARY 



perhaps hastened the introduction of a more natural 

 taste which burst forth later." Some further idea of 

 the prevalence of clipped trees is obtained from Celia 

 Fiennes, who, in her chronicles of a journey " Through 

 England on a Side Saddle in the time of William and 

 Mary," makes frequent reference to alleys of clipped 

 trees and to yew and cypress cut into " severall forms." 

 William III. commenced the Kensington Gardens, and 

 to alter a disfiguring gravel pit he employed the ser- 

 vices of those famous Brompton nurserymen, London 

 and Wise. In our time such a spot would in all proba- 

 bility be converted into a dell, with water and rock 

 gardens, but London and Wise erected a mimic fortifica- 

 tion, making the bastions and counterscarps of clipped 

 yew and variegated holly. That this production was 

 44 long an object of wonder" can be easily understood, 

 though whether it was one for "admiration" is open to 

 question, notwithstanding that it had many admirers and 

 was known as the " Siege of Troy." 



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 pre- 

 posterous 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." 



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 



