MANAGEMENT OF YOUNG TREES 65 
course itis 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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