Editing Topiary (section)

===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}}