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==History== ===Origin=== [[File:Pt-ctb-jardimpaco.jpg|thumb|[[Castelo Branco, Portugal|Castelo Branco]] Portugal]] European topiary dates from [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] times. Pliny's ''[[Natural History (Pliny)|Natural History]]'' and the epigram writer [[Martial]] both credit [[Gaius Matius|Gaius Matius Calvinus]], in the circle of [[Julius Caesar]], with introducing the first topiary to [[Roman gardens]], and [[Pliny the Younger]] describes in a letter the elaborate figures of animals, inscriptions, cyphers and [[obelisk]]s in clipped greens at his Tuscan villa (Epistle v.6, to Apollinaris). Within the [[Atrium (architecture)|atrium]] of a Roman house or [[Roman villa|villa]], a place that had formerly been quite plain, the art of the ''topiarius'' produced a miniature landscape (''topos'') which might employ the art of stunting trees, also mentioned, disapprovingly, by Pliny (''Historia Naturalis'' xii.6). ===Far Eastern topiary=== [[File:Korea-Geoje-Oedo 4098-06.JPG|thumb|Cloud-pruning only distantly related to natural forms in Hallyeo Haesang National Park, [[Geoje]], South Korea]] The clipping and shaping of shrubs and trees in [[China]] and [[Japan]] have been practised with equal rigor, but for different reasons. The goal is to achieve an artful expression of the "natural" form of venerably aged pines, given character by the forces of wind and weather. Their most concentrated expressions are in the related arts of Chinese [[penjing]] and Japanese [[bonsai]].{{cn|date=September 2024}} Japanese [[cloud tree|cloud-pruning]] is closest to the European art: the cloud-like forms of clipped growth are designed to be best appreciated after a fall of snow. [[Japanese rock garden|Japanese Zen gardens]] (''karesansui'', dry rock gardens) make extensive use of ''Karikomi'' (a topiary technique of clipping shrubs and trees into large curved shapes or sculptures) and ''Hako-zukuri'' (shrubs clipped into boxes and straight lines). [[File:Hortus Palatinus und Heidelberger Schloss von Jacques Fouquiere.jpg|thumb|Simple upright topiary shapes punctuate the patterned parterres of Heidelberg c. 1590, in this view by [[Jacques Fouquiere]]]] ===Renaissance topiary=== Since its European revival in the 16th century, topiary has been seen on the [[parterre]]s and [[Terrace garden|terraces]] of gardens of the European elite, as well as in simple [[cottage garden]]s; [[Barnabe Googe]], about 1578, found that "women" (a signifier of a less than gentle class) were clipping [[rosemary]] "as in the fashion of a cart, a peacock, or such things as they fancy."<ref>Noted in Charles Curtis and W. Gibson, ''The Book of Topiary'', 1904, p. 15.</ref> In 1618 [[William Lawson (priest)|William Lawson]] suggested: :Your gardener can frame your lesser wood to the shape of men armed in the field, ready to give battell: or swift-running Grey Houndes to chase the Deere, or hunt the Hare. This kind of hunting shall not wate your corne, nor much your coyne.<ref>Lawson, ''A New Orchard and Garden'' 1618.</ref> Traditional topiary forms use foliage pruned or trained into geometric shapes such as balls or cubes, [[obelisk]]s, pyramids, cones, or tiered plates and tapering spirals. Representational forms depicting people, animals, and man-made objects have also been popular. The royal botanist [[John Parkinson (botanist)|John Parkinson]] found [[privet]] "so apt that no other can be like unto it, to be cut, lead, and drawn into what forme one will, either of beasts, birds, or men armed or otherwise." Evergreens have usually been the first choice for Early Modern topiary, however, with [[yew]] and [[box (tree)|boxwood]] leading other plants.{{citation needed|date=September 2024}} Topiary at [[Gardens of Versailles|Versailles]] and its imitators was never complicated: low hedges punctuated by potted trees trimmed as balls on standards, interrupted by obelisks at corners, provided the vertical features of flat-patterned parterre gardens. Sculptural forms were provided by stone and lead sculptures. In Holland, however, the fashion was established for more complicated topiary designs; this Franco-Dutch garden style spread to England after 1660, but by 1708β09 one searches in vain for fanciful topiary among the clipped hedges and edgings, and the standing cones and obelisks of the aristocratic and gentry English parterre gardens in Kip and Knyff's ''[[Britannia Illustrata]]''.{{citation needed|date=September 2024}} ===Decline in the 18th century=== [[File:Levenshall1833.jpg|thumb|[[Levens Hall]]'s Elizabethan topiary in 1833]] In England topiary was all but killed as a fashion by the famous satiric essay on "Verdant Sculpture" that [[Alexander Pope]] published in the short-lived newspaper ''The Guardian'', 29 September 1713, with its mock catalogue descriptions of :*Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the tree of knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the serpent very flourishing. :*The [[tower of Babel]], not yet finished. :*St George in [[Buxus|box]]; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in condition to stick the [[dragon]] by next April. :*A [[Privet|quickset]] hog, shot up into a [[porcupine]], by its being forgot a week in rainy weather. In the 1720s and 1730s, the generation of [[Charles Bridgeman]] and [[William Kent]] swept the English garden clean of its hedges, mazes, and topiary. Although topiary fell from grace in aristocratic gardens, it continued to be featured in [[cottage]]rs' gardens, where a single example of traditional forms, a ball, a tree trimmed to a cone in several cleanly separated tiers, meticulously clipped and perhaps topped with a topiary peacock, might be passed on as an heirloom. Such an heirloom, but on heroic scale, was the ancient churchward yew of [[Harlington, London|Harlington, west of London]], immortalized in an engraved broadsheet of 1729 bearing an illustration with an enthusiastic verse encomium by its dedicated parish clerk and topiarist.<ref>[http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1550516&partId=1 "Poet Iohn Saxy upon his Yew-Tree Novr 1729"], broadsheet, 1729 reissued 1770 (British Library); the print was the gift of Dorothea, Lady Banks, the wife of the eminent botanist Sir [[Joseph Banks]].</ref> formerly shaped as an obelisk on square plinth topped with a ten-foot ball surmounted by a cockerel, the Harlington Yew survives today, untonsured for the last two centuries.{{citation needed|date=September 2024}}
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