18 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 
‘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 
MRR sei ngs 
