46 
House & Garden 
Against solid walls of dark yew have been grown specimen statues carved in juniper. This forms the termination 
of the canal, and is placed in such a relationship to the water that the sombre coloring of the yew is intensified and 
the light tones of the juniper made still more lovely. The garden was designed by Mr. Romaine-Walker 
AN ENGLISH TOPIARY GARDEN 
In a Slight Thirty Years this Garden Has Been Grown So that Now It Rivals 
Some of the Most Ancient Gardens of England 
H ALFWAY between the formal, architec¬ 
tural garden of Le Notre, the garden of 
which Versailles is the splendid model, 
and the so-called English garden, with its less 
geometrical pattern and its absence of archi¬ 
tecture, stands the topiary garden. 
The builder and the architect had as great 
a hand in the making of a 
formal garden as the horti¬ 
culturist. Terraces, statues, 
walls and arches were more 
important in these elaborate 
creations than growing 
plants. 
The topiarist makes the 
best of both worlds. He is 
both builder and architect, 
but the materials he uses 
are living trees instead of 
inanimate stone. Where the 
ordinary gardener must 
necessarily work in irregu¬ 
lar broken masses, the topi¬ 
arist can employ straight 
lines, plane surfaces and all 
the forms of solid geometry. 
At the same time his green 
masonry has this advantage 
over the architect’s stone¬ 
work, that it is alive and 
diversified by the innumer¬ 
able intricate details of a living organism. A 
flat surface that is composed of countless little 
leaves is more interesting, richer in quality 
than the flat surface of a stone. 
There are few things more thoroughly satis¬ 
factory to the eye than a high wall of yew, well 
proportioned, thick as the bastions of a Nor¬ 
man keep. Whether it recedes from the eye in 
long, straight lines, or is broken by projections 
and towers and embrasures, or is curved into 
the shape of a dark, semi-circular apse of 
foliage, the yew hedge is always a thing of 
beauty. For broad effects of garden architec¬ 
ture, for simple massiveness, there is nothing 
to compare with topiary 
work. 
The topiarist’s difficul¬ 
ties begin when he ceases to 
be content with broad ef¬ 
fects and tries to produce 
detailed work. Even the 
most enthusiastic carver in 
foliage must admit that, for 
statuary, Parian marble 
has distinct advantages 
over yew or any other tree. 
The very nature of the fat¬ 
ter precludes fine detail. 
In laying out this topi¬ 
ary garden the designer has 
made some interesting ex¬ 
periments in color varia¬ 
tion—yew, juniper, Irish 
yew, laurel, golden yew, 
box and ivy have been 
mingled so as to relieve the 
unvaried sombreness of the 
plain yew hedge. 
On a dry, arid btnk is a thick plantation of laurels, clipped to an even surface, while 
at the top come the finer foliage and forms of yew. The way leads by these stone 
steps from the forest up to the level open stretches of the garden 
