Category Archives: Topiary

Garden Inspiration at Restoration House

Front gate at Restoration House, Rochester

Back in September, I paid a visit to Restoration House, a remarkable house and garden located in Rochester, Kent. Originally two buildings of medieval origin, these were combined in the late 16^th or early 17^th century to create a city mansion house. Restoration House takes its name from a visit King Charles II made on the eve of his restoration to the throne in May 1660. But this name also seems singularly appropriate to its current owners, Johnathan Wilmot and Robert Tucker, who’ve cared for the house since 1994 and restored it with sensitivity and meticulous attention to historical detail.

On the day we visited, we were greeted by an enthusiastic band of local volunteers who invigilate the rooms open to the public, and welcome guests. Moving through the house, a combination of plain waxed floorboards, wood panelling and limewashed walls produces a softness in the light, and a sense of calm, forming a perfect setting for the owners’ extensive collections of elegant period furniture, paintings and sculpture.

(As this house is also a home, it’s not usually permitted to take photographs, but for anyone curious to learn more about the story of Restoration House, and see images of its interiors, there are links to the website and to an excellent feature at the Bible of British Taste below).

Outside, the gardens are a continuation of the owners’ skill in choosing and arranging beautiful plants, objects and materials to create a series of contrasting spaces. Working with the considerable challenges of the site, with frequent changes of level and tall walls that enclose and divide the garden, some areas are relaxed and intimate, inviting one or two people to linger and enjoy a view, while others like the impressive box parterre and the Renaissance garden have a more formal atmosphere. Two gardeners maintain these gardens to an exceptionally high standard.

Front view, Restoration House, Rochester

Back view of Restoration House with lawn mown diagonally creating a diamond pattern

As well as historical planting, the garden full of brightly coloured salvias, enjoying the early autumn sunshine

The Renaissance garden which incorporates a section of Tudor wall

Passing through the garden, one of the delights is the tiny kitchen garden. Bordered by an open structure made of wooden poles and trellis supporting espaliered apple trees, the square space is divided by narrow brick paths. Asparagus is grown here, together with flowers for the house. On one corner, an antique iron gate adds to the rustic feel.

The kitchen garden is enclosed with an open structure made of wooden poles and trellis work

Inside the kitchen garden where fruit, vegetables and flowers are grown

Handmade wooden trellis

Espaliered apple with wooden ladder and tools. The trug is one of the few plastic items we saw in the garden

A fine ironwork gate in the kitchen garden

Two charming greenhouses, both constructed using salvaged glass and frames, contain collections of pelargoniums in terracotta pots and tropical plants as well as various galvanised watering cans.

Greenhouse made out of various salvaged materials

Leaded windows in another greenhouse

A variety of materials are used for paving and pathways in the garden from stone flags, to brick and granite setts. Some of the setts form mini stepping stones to prevent too much wear in areas of lawn which receive high volumes of traffic from visitors.

Herringbone brickwork pathway

Setts

Setts sunk into the lawn

Wooden structure supporting clematis and steps leading to another section of the garden

There’s an abundance of statuary in the garden, and one of my favourite pieces was this young man, placed amongst the cold frames and a collection of planted containers. Elsewhere, a kneeling ram on an ornate stone plinth is placed against the dark green backdrop of some yew topiary, and makes a pleasing contrast to the functional plainness of a garden bench nearby.

Statue of a young man with cold frames and pot arrangement

Sculpture of a kneeling ram with garden seat

The garden is full of topiary, much of it carefully clipped into bottle shapes. These strong forms are a theme in the garden and help to create a sense of unity between the various spaces. Here, two matching trees frame the entrance to a lower part of the garden, their formal shapes contrasting with the spreading branches of an enormous quince tree. Topiary seems to possess the ability to look at home in every garden, whatever its size.

Yew topiary with quince tree beyond

Twin containers framing a doorway to the house

Many of the plants in the garden like box, lavender, sage, mulberry, quince, medlar and apple trees would have been familiar in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. When we visited, lavender and sweet woodruff were being used as strewing herbs in the toilets. This custom dates back to medieval times, where fragrant herbs were placed on floors so that people walking on them would release their sweet smelling fragrances. Although the concept of strewing herbs was familiar to me, this was the first time I’d experienced the actual effect, which brought this element of social history vividly to life.

The garden also includes plants that were introduced to England later, such as dahlias and salvias, which have become popular in recent years, valued for their intense colours and long flowering season. Inside, Restoration House is full of flowers cut from the garden.

A mulberry tree dominates this bed, close to the kitchen garden

Quince

Fruitful lemon tree in a terracotta container

Thanks to Johnathan Wilmot and Robert Tucker for sharing this special and atmospheric place. On their website, there’s much more about the history of the building and the battle to acquire the land on which the Renaissance garden now stands. Restoration House and Gardens are open on Thursdays and Fridays from June to September – see below for more details.

Gertrude Jekyll’s Cottage Gardens

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Cottage porch from Old West Surrey (1904) by Gertrude Jekyll (University of California Libraries)

Gertrude Jekyll’s Old West Surrey Some Notes and Memories (1904) represents something of a departure from her vast output of books and articles about plants and garden design. This study of the locality around her home at Munstead Wood reveals an enthusiasm for all aspects of vernacular architecture and the rural way of life in this part of southern England, which was rapidly disappearing at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Illustrated with dozens of Jekyll’s photographs, details of farm buildings and cottages, trades, furniture, tools and everyday household articles are documented – and, of course, the people she encountered on her travels. Jekyll dedicates a whole chapter of her book to the cottage garden, praising both the skill of the cottage gardener, and the dedication needed to maintain the displays of flowers over the season.

This style of gardening, with roses framing the front door and a profusion of flowers in the borders, was a favourite of Jekyll’s and examples of cottage gardens regularly appear in her other published works. These gardens are still deservedly popular, despite associations of sentimentality and nostalgia, perhaps because this unpretentious style of planting complements smaller houses so well. Any meanness in the scale of the building is softened and the cottage front garden, in particular, lifts the spirits of passers-by as well as providing pleasure for the owners themselves.

Here follow Jekyll’s photographs of cottage gardens from Old West Surrey together with some of her observations about them. Her detailed knowledge of plants makes this a useful resource for anyone wishing to re-create a cottage garden from this period. Links to the text below:

‘The most usual form of the cottage flower-garden is a strip on each side of the path leading from the road to the cottage door. But if the space is a small one, it is often all given to flowers. Sometimes, indeed, the smaller the space the more is crammed into it. One tiny garden I used to watch with much pleasure, had nearly the whole space between road and cottage filled with a rough staging. It was a good example of how much could be done with little means but much loving labour. There was a tiny green-house, of which the end shows to the left of the picture, that housed the tender plants in winter, but it could not have held anything like the quantity of plants that appeared on the staging throughout the summer. There were hydrangeas, fuschias, show and zonal geraniums, lilies and begonias, for the main show; a pot or two of the graceful francoa, and half-hardy annuals cleverly grown in pots; a clematis smothered in bloom, over the door, and, for the protection of all, a framework, to which a light shelter could be fixed in case of very bad weather.

It must have given pleasure to thousands of passers-by; to say nothing of the pride and delight that it must have been to its owner.’

‘There is scarcely a cottage without some plants in the window; indeed the windows are often so much filled up with them that the light is too much obscured. The wise cottagers place them outside in the summer, to make fresh growth and to gain strength. These window plants are the objects of much care, and often make fine specimens.’

‘The deep-rooting Everlasting Pea (Winterbean is its local name) is a fine old cottage plant, and Nasturtiums ramble far and wide. Nowhere else does one see such Wallflowers, Sweet-Williams, and Canterbury Bells, as in these carefully-tended little plots.’

‘Here and there is a clipped yew over a cottage entrance; but this kind of work is not so frequent as in other parts of the country.’

‘China Asters are great favourites – ‘Chaney Oysters’ the old people used to call them – and Dahlias, especially the tight, formal show kinds are much prized and grandly grown.

Sweet smelling bushes and herbs, such as rosemary, lavender, southernwood, mint, sage and balm, or at least some of them were to be found in the older cottagers’ garden plots.’

From Wood and Garden, first published in 1899.

Quintessential cottage garden from Wood and Garden first published 1899.

A Revival of English Topiary

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From The Book of Topiary (1904) Charles Henry Curtis and William Gibson (Biodiversity Heritage Library)

While visiting some Kent and East Sussex gardens recently, I was struck by the range of topiary we saw. The yew peacocks at Great Dixter are well known, as are the birds, animals and accomplished geometric forms in yew and box at Charlotte and Donald Molesworth’s garden in Benenden, (which opens to the public for the National Gardens Scheme). Our travels through villages revealed more topiarised trees and shrubs, often a feature in cottage front gardens.

There is something about topiary that associates pleasingly with cottages and other English vernacular buildings, seeming to complement their scale and sense of history. The designer Arne Maynard frequently uses these forms as structural elements in his gardens, using the formality of the tightly clipped trees as a contrast to much looser plantings, like a meadow or perennials and roses.

These topiary forms of tiered pyramids, spirals and birds feel quintessentially English, but as with so many garden fashions their origins lie elsewhere – in this case, Boksoop in The Netherlands, according to The Book of Topiary (1904). This book by Charles Henry Curtis and William Gibson provides a fascinating overview of the art in England from an Edwardian perspective. Curtis handles the history and Gibson, in his capacity as head gardener at Levens Hall in Cumbria, where the topiary was planted in the 1690s (and remains largely unchanged today) explains about training and maintenance.

From its heyday in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Curtis argues, topiary in England fell out of favour as the influence of landscape gardening gathered pace, and Victorian gardeners like William Robinson advocated a more naturalistic approach to planting. However, with the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19^th century and its focus on medieval art and architecture, there was a revival of interest in topiary for domestic gardens.

Curtis mentions two nurseries, William Cutbush & Sons of Highgate, London and J. Cheal & Sons in Crawley, Sussex that in the early 1900s were supplying topiary specimens to the public and showing plants at RHS shows. The aptly named Herbert J. Cutbush was a regular visitor to Holland, travelling there on most weekends, and it was here that he came across topiary specimens that interested him. Curtis says:

‘He discovered that some of the best trained and the best furnished specimens of sculptured yew and box were to be found in the farmhouse gardens, in small, almost unknown villages, far from the usual routes of tourists and business-men, and this led to still further explorations.’

Over time, Cutbush got to know the Dutch topiary growers who were located in the Boskoop district, inland from The Hague and Rotterdam. He persuaded them to sell him plants from their nurseries for import to England, but would also buy specimens from private gardens:

‘One big tree that for sixty years had been the chief ornament of a Dutch blacksmith’s garden was only purchased after a whole day spent in persuasion and the consumption of much Schiedam, and after the purchase was made another week was spent in lifting and packing and removing the tree to the London steamer.’

The trouble and expense of importing plants like this one suggests that the market in England was sufficient to make the effort worthwhile. The topiary designs that Cutbush saw in Boksoop are described in detail by Curtis:

‘There is a great variety of form in the Dutch clipped trees, but spires surmounted with birds seem to be among the most common and are as easy to produce as most. For these, and for the peacocks and the spiral or serpentine columns, yew is almost invariably used.’

‘Pyramids, mop-heads and blunt cones are among the commonest designs; they do not call for the exercise of much ingenuity, but when these pyramidal trees are cut into several regular and well graded tiers their cost increases considerably.’

Cutbush also reported examples of topiary furniture such as tables with turned legs and armchairs, churches and crosses as well as ‘verdant poultry’:

‘Sitting hens, geese and ducks are common designs, and to protect the verdant poultry one may obtain equally verdant dogs, with or without kennels’

The Dutch topiary shrubs were field grown and Cutbush says that box birds might be trained for 10 – 12 years before they were lifted for export – dogs would need a little longer at 12 – 14 years. To make the eventual lifting easier, the roots of the shrubs were pruned after a year’s growth. Curtis and Gibson’s book doesn’t feature any photographs from Holland or the Cutbush nurseries, but there are several photographs from Cheal’s nursery at Crawley, showing many of the topiary forms described.

Today, Boksoop remains a centre for topiary with several nurseries still exporting their shrubs. And as I witnessed last week, the domestic themed topiary that so inspired Cutbush lives on abundantly in English gardens.