Читать книгу The book of topiary онлайн

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The beginning of the end was not now far to seek. One of our greatest modern landscape gardeners, Mr H. E. Milner, has written: “Precise designs of clipped box and yew are not out of place, if the building has a character that is consonant with such an accompaniment.” Not satisfied with a few clipped trees in suitable positions, or with a part of the garden devoted to examples of Topiary, owners and gardeners alike, in the times I have briefly reviewed, seemed to have laboured to fill their gardens with illustrations of geometric figures, in box or yew; with the quaintest patterns and weirdest shapes, caricaturing birds and beasts, and imitating architecture and things of common use. Distorted vegetation met the eye everywhere, and there was little of the natural and beautiful to relieve the general monotony. It was the excessive use of Topiary that led to its own downfall and caused Batty Langley to ask, “Is there anything more shocking than a stiff, regular garden?”