Meet topiary’s top scissorhands

Avenues of lollipop trees, a pair of dogs standing guard by a front door, a frog wearing a crown and a vast seascape complete with whales, sharks and a passing sailboat. These living sculptures, neatly clipped in holm oak, box and yew, are among the winning entries of Henchman’s inaugural Topiary Awards announced at last week’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Garden Festival. They are as wacky and thoroughly British as you’d imagine. 

Launched earlier this year, the competition to find Britain’s top topiary artists was inspired by the increasingly stellar clipping skills that the firm’s customers were sharing. “But the topiary submitted was still far more creative than we expected,” says Henchman’s managing director Owen Simpson. They included a life-size tractor complete with farmer, the New York skyline and the aforementioned sea-themed hedge that took 45 years to nurture in the Aberdeenshire garden of David Hawson. He won first place in the Home Gardener category.

The winner of the Professional Gardener category, meanwhile, went to Harrie Carnochan, a Sussex-based designer and gardener (@the_sussex_gardener) whose entry was an immaculate formal garden complete with a series of precision-clipped box enclosures with obelisk pillars surrounding pristine lollipop trees.

The criteria, says co-judge and professional topiarist Andy Bourke (@the_hedge_barber) was as rigorous as any horticultural show, with scores on concept and design, technical skills and tools, accuracy and skill. For a formal scheme with a series of geometric shapes that need to work together, the margin of error is almost zero. “The work that has gone into Harrie’s design is phenomenal in terms of trying to get the symmetry right,” says Bourke of Carnochan’s winning creation. “Everything has to line up where he’s working with different textures, different shapes. One little mistake, one line that’s not right and you can see it a mile away.” Freeform designs, while still requiring extreme skill, are much more forgiving. 

The Henchman competition reflects the revival of interest in topiary, and Bourke has seen an explosion in people who have taken it up over the past five or six years, fuelled largely by the wealth of images on social media and by the professionals who routinely share their work and provide tips on cutting techniques, tools and their process.

One little mistake, one line that’s not right, and you can see it a mile away

It’s a particularly British pastime. “Topiary has, of course, been around for hundreds of years,” says Simpson. “Everything comes back around, but I think topiary and pristine hedge-cutting shouts English gardens, and it’s a way to create interesting shapes and structure if you’re not creating interest in your garden through flowers and colour.”

In 1979, the writer and filmmaker Candida Lycett Green documented England’s obsession in her cult film The Front Garden, for which she toured the country from Dagenham to the picturesque villages of Wiltshire. She discovered clipped yews as tall as houses, manicured arches, animals eulogised in Buxus, as well as life-size steam trains and even a ship in Oxfordshire – the HMS Verity, a Royal Navy V-class destroyer, created by a former torpedo officer who had served on her. 

The national obsession with topiary runs deep, but beginners are starting out with simpler forms these days. While shapes are still popular – chickens, ducks, peacocks and chess pieces are all current favourites – cloud-pruned box and hedges have become by far the most requested form for professional topiarists such as Bourke. The only threat to it now seems to be the insatiable box-tree caterpillar, which can decimate established hedges in days. A spraying regime can keep the pests at bay, Bourke insists. His other advice is the cleanest and sharpest of tools – he often sharpens his Japanese topiary shears at lunchtime if he’s clipping all day and routinely dunks them into a bucket of heavily diluted bleach to avoid the spread of diseases in his plants. The other useful piece of kit? A towering Henchman topiary ladder. Naturally.