66 THE BOOK OF TOPIARY 



good specimens, notably a lion and crown, the Howard 

 crest, that we have got in the garden here at Levens. 

 Then there are the various other shapes that are to be 

 found in the old Topiary gardens, such as barristers' 

 wigs, Indian wigwams, summer-houses, helmets, busbys, 

 bottles of almost any description or size, umbrellas, hats 

 or spirals of various forms. These may be either trained 

 as single trees, or formed into arches. Among the 

 newer shapes that I have seen, which have recently 

 been introduced into the Topiary art, are yachts, boats, 

 jugs, etc. The different sizes and shapes of jugs are so 

 varied, that any person who fancies the training of them 

 in his garden need not lack variety of form, and they 

 are shapes that are, comparatively speaking, very easy to 

 train. There are also a great many very pretty shapes 

 that can be formed out of the yew or the boxwood tree 

 without being intended to represent anything in par- 

 ticular, further than that they are trained and shaped 

 simply as ornaments to help to add further to the 

 embellishment of the garden. 



It is not my intention to try to explain the various 

 ways of training all the different shapes I have pointed 

 out. That in itself would require a chapter ; as the 

 different ways of training a yew or any other tree are so 

 numerous, to attain what is practically the same end, 

 that the person responsible for the work will have to be 

 guided greatly by circumstances and according to the 

 particular tree he has got to work upon. In every 

 Topiary garden there should be at least four or five 

 different arches of various designs. There are very 

 few things that are more effective in any garden than a 

 few well-trained arches, and in the Topiary garden, if 

 they are not more effective than in the modern garden, 

 they are at any rate more in keeping with the general 

 surroundings of the place. If it has been decided to 

 train several arches in the garden, each one should be 



