MANAGEMENT OF YOUNG TREES 65 



course it is quite possible to train almost any letter, and 

 succeed in making a fairly good job of it, with the aid 

 of a little assistance in the shape of a few wooden 

 supports, etc. But wood is never very satisfactory, for 

 this reason that when it is used, it will have to be in 

 most cases green, in order to make it pliable and easy 

 to bend. Green wood has a tendency to decay very soon, 

 and the first strong winds that come will very likely 

 break the supports, and blow the whole thing to pieces, 

 or at least damage it so as to make it require to be re- 

 trained again. In the process of training yew or any 

 other tree into letters, the appearance of each letter will 

 be greatly improved if from one and a half to two feet 

 of stem be left between the ground and the commence- 

 ment of the letter. This stem should be afterwards 

 planted round with small boxwood trees, and clipped so 

 as to form a pedestal, which may be of any shape 

 desired. There are two ways or shapes into which 

 letters can be trained, either the round or the square. 

 The square way of training them is the one I would 

 strongly recommend to my readers, from an ornamental 

 point of view, but it is at the same time the most diffi- 

 cult method. As I explained in my last chapter, 

 anything with square edges is more difficult to clip 

 exactly right than a round object. 



In the Topiary garden, the variety of shapes that it is 

 possible to train are so many and varied that I will only 

 give a few of those that can either be copied from the 

 old gardens, or formed from the Topiarist's own ideas. 

 In the first instance, there are the various shapes of the 

 figures required in the game of chess. Birds of any 

 description are easy to form into shape in either yew or 

 boxwood. When they are well trained and properly 

 shaped, nothing has a better appearance in the Topiary 

 garden than the various shapes of birds. The shaping of 

 animals is more difficult to manage ; but I have seen some 



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