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Tag: Topiary

  • Jake Hobson’s Garden: A Tour of the Niwaki Founder’s Mini-Forest Backyard

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    Jake Hobson is a master pruner. He’s written two books on pruning: Niwaki: Pruning, Training, and Shaping Trees the Japanese Way and The Art of Creative Pruning: Inventive Ideas for Shaping Trees and Shrubs. And he’s the founder of Niwaki, a Japanese-inspired garden tool company headquartered in England. So, it should come as no surprise that his home landscape in Dorset is full of artfully shaped, precisely pruned shrubs and trees. But it isn’t your usual English garden with clipped hedges—nor is it a replica of Japanese gardens.

    “Everything I do is inspired by Japan, but I’m deliberately not making it all Japanese,” explains Hobson. “There’s no koi pond or red bridges.” Not only does Hobson eschew any decorative Japanese elements, he avoids ornaments altogether. “For me, a Japanese garden is creating a sense of a landscape—an idealized landscape—within the plot. If you bring in ornaments, you ruin the magic of scale. Whereas, if all you’ve got is plants, you can create a sense (if you squint and after a couple of drinks) that maybe you’re looking out into a deep forest.”

    Hobson has successfully created this illusion of landscape within his small space. Looking out the windows of the home he shares with his wife, Keiko, and their son, or gazing at photographs of Hobson’s green, layered garden, it’s hard to believe that it’s not much bigger than a tennis court. 

    When Hobson and his wife bought the house, the backyard had four sheds, a mismatched bunch of overgrown conifers, and a ton of concrete paths. They ripped it all out, leaving just the evergreen hedge that blocks the view from a neighboring building. Hobson commissioned a local carpenter to build a single new shed inspired by a Japanese “summer house” at the back of the plot. Then he planted dozens of evergreen and coniferous shrubs and trees that he has been training and pruning for the last fourteen years. The result is a garden that feels like its own miniature world, full of living sculptures.

    Let’s take a tour of Hobson’s garden, which he photographed himself. (You can follow him on Instagram @niwakijake.)

    Every year Hobson lets the grass grow long and mows a new path through it. “Zigzagging through the garden is a really Japanese thing,” he notes. “You never just go straight into a house.” At right are some of Hobson’s undulating boxwood and a Phillyrea latifolia, which Hobson calls a “cloud-pruned tree.” (He had been growing it for years at his parents home before moving it to the garden.)
    Above: Every year Hobson lets the grass grow long and mows a new path through it. “Zigzagging through the garden is a really Japanese thing,” he notes. “You never just go straight into a house.” At right are some of Hobson’s undulating boxwood and a Phillyrea latifolia, which Hobson calls a “cloud-pruned tree.” (He had been growing it for years at his parents home before moving it to the garden.)

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  • Iford Manor: A Tour Its Magnificent Gardens in Somerset

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    Last month, the Garden Museum Literary Festival (a traveling event that visits a different historic garden each year in the U.K.) arrived at Iford Manor, just a few miles southeast of Bath in Somerset, England. Over two days, there were fascinating talks and conversations with designers, writers, and makers, including potters Edmund de Waal and  Frances Palmer; photographers Tessa Traeger and Ngoc Minh Ngo; and landscape architects Jinny Blom and Tom Stuart-Smith.

    But perhaps the most wonderful discovery was the location itself. Iford is a Palladian manor house (its Georgian façade conceals its older Elizabethan origins) with an extraordinary Italianate garden created by the architect-turned-landscape-architect, Harold Peto, who bought the property in 1899 and developed the gardens until his death in 1933.

    Location is everything—and Iford Manor’s is spectacular. Although “challenging” might be the way some describe it. Accessible only via two narrow, twisting lanes which meet on a medieval stone bridge that crosses the River Frome, the property sits on a slope in a wooded valley on the cusp of Somerset and Wiltshire. The steep slope means that the garden has been cut into the hillside in a series of terraces and walks, many of which are designed to offer tantalizing views out to the bucolic landscape.

    Although much of the garden had been created long before Peto’s arrival, his passion for the Italianate style, and for ancient architecture, statuary, and antiquities led him to reimagine it into a series of classical and often theatrical walks and rooms.

    Its modern renovation begins with Elizabeth Cartwright, who bought the property from Peto’s nephew in 1965 and began a series of repairs. Along with her husband John Hignett she would continue to restore the house and garden until their son and daughter-in-law, William and Marianne Cartwright-Hignett, became the custodians in 2016. In 2022 head gardener Steve Lannin arrived to continue the estate’s development and preservation.

    Join us for a tour.

    Photography by Clare Coulson.

    The Cloisters

    Above: Arguably the jewel of the garden is the Grade II* listed Cloisters that were built by Peto in 1914 to house his remaining artifacts. The columns are cut from Pavonazzo marble. This magical space is made all the more exquisite by the play of light across the architecture and the plants, carefully placed by Lannin.
    Above: The perfect symmetry and elegant arches of the courtyard in the Cloisters were in part inspired by the Moorish architecture of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

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  • Garden Visit: Charlotte Molesworth’s Topiaries at Balmoral Cottage

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    When Donald and Charlotte Molesworth first arrived at their small Kent cottage more than three decades ago, there was a derelict house and an almost totally blank canvas. The plot had once been the kitchen garden of an estate that belonged to “Cherry” Ingram, the great Victorian plant hunter. It may have looked like a wasteland, but it was one with fertile soil that had been improved over centuries.

    What the couple have created since then is nothing short of extraordinary: a flourishing garden that centers around Charlotte’s awe-inspiring topiary and a cluster of small buildings (including a holiday cottage to rent) in the beautiful Kent landscape. On a rainy day we joined Charlotte for a tour of Balmoral Cottage:

    Photography by Clare Coulson for Gardenista.

    Above: The house and garden is almost entirely hidden from view, which makes the magical entrance under an arch of hornbeam and down a path of ball-topped boxwood, even more tantalizing.

    Balmoral Cottage is down an unmade track and tucked away behind St George’s church in the picture-postcard village of Benenden. Charlotte insists there was no masterplan when they began the garden. They requested yew seedlings as their wedding gifts and they planted them all before transplanting them at a later date.

    All the boxwood in the garden (and there are many varieties) was also grown from seedlings, many collected on Charlotte’s travels.
    Above: All the boxwood in the garden (and there are many varieties) was also grown from seedlings, many collected on Charlotte’s travels.

    Charlotte’s horticultural talent is in her blood. Her father was a farmer on the nearby North Downs and her mother was a plantswoman who grew and sold primulas and had a love of yew. It was her aunt, another talented gardener, who first planted the seed, of training topiary. Charlotte’s skills and her garden have grown organically.

    Charlotte
    Above: Charlotte’s advice for those starting a garden is to think vertically: “When you start a garden, I think it’s the one thing that you often don’t think about, yet it’s this structure that is so valuable in the garden.”

    Almost everything here has been grown, recycled, or rescued (“We are great scavengers,” admits Charlotte). The greenhouses have been built using unwanted materials destined for the scrap heap; the polytunnels were rescued. Even some of the garden’s most beautiful trees (including some stunning Malus Huphensis) were picked up as tiny seedlings on walks through the next-door estate many years ago. The large Pinus radiata and Scot’s pine that edge the garden also contribute to a wonderful borrowed landscape.

    The central walk of the garden is lined with box and towering topiary which leads down to a large pond. While the couple share gardening duties, Charlotte admits that she can be quite possessive over her hedging and topiary.
    Above: The central walk of the garden is lined with box and towering topiary which leads down to a large pond. While the couple share gardening duties, Charlotte admits that she can be quite possessive over her hedging and topiary.

    She’s very picky about plant hygiene as her garden is currently untouched by the ravages of box blight. She uses an organic treatment of effective microorganisms to keep the plants healthy and she is fanatical when pruning, sterilizing tools as she trims with a bleach solution. When she works on other people’s gardens, she will not only sterilize all her tools when she gets home, she will also wash all her clothes and take a shower, to ensure that no disease or harmful blight spores can travel with her.

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  • Jake Hobson: An Interview with the Founder of Niwaki

    Jake Hobson: An Interview with the Founder of Niwaki

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    Today’s featured guest submitted the most succinct bio we’ve had the pleasure of receiving so far: “I studied sculpture / went to Japan / discovered gardens and tree pruning / founded Niwaki.”  To that we add: became a master of and missionary for cloud pruning (the art of Japanese topiary); introduced Japanese tools, including the iconic tripod ladder, to Western gardeners; and grew a brand that has, since its founding in 2007, become synonymous with Japanese craftsmanship and style.

    Contrary to the Quick Takes spirit, we asked Jake Hobson to elaborate on his answer: “When I first got interested in shaping and pruning I was in Japan. I kept seeing these amazing trees that looked so different to ours, and it took me a while to realise that it wasn’t because they were different species, but because they’d been pruned that way. Pruned to look like trees! I think that’s a very Japanese thing, refining something natural, reducing it to its essence. Since then, my passion has grown beyond the conceptual, to the practical. I love the physical side of pruning, both the immediacy of clipping—being in the moment—and the longterm consequences of what a single decision or cut can do. Generally, I’m quite impatient, but when it comes to plants, I love the sense of time involved.”

    Read on for Jake’s thoughts on good conifers versus bad conifers, his favorite and least favorite plants (both begin with “ph”), and more.

    Photography by Jake Hobson, unless otherwise noted.

    Above: Jake at work in his own garden. Photograph by Jake’s son, Digby Hobson.

    Your first garden memory:

    Playing in the sandpit with a huge spade. I grew up in Hampshire [in the UK] and actually have more memories of the woods than the garden. Campfires. The smell of wild garlic amongst coppiced hazel. The dark stillness of ivy covered understory beneath beech and yews.

    Garden-related book you return to time and again:

    Woody Plants of Japan, published by Yama Kei. It’s in Japanese and lists every tree and shrub imaginable. Would make a good partner to The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs.

    Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

    My mother’s old garden, with clipped Phillyrea, Rhamnus, bay laurel and boxwood, sitting with Eleagnus, Eriobotrya and yucca.
    Above: My mother’s old garden, with clipped Phillyrea, Rhamnus, bay laurel and boxwood, sitting with Eleagnus, Eriobotrya and yucca. “She planted, I pruned and shaped over 20 years,” he shares.

    Sculpture. Nature. Jaketure.

    Plant that makes you swoon:

    Anything laden with ripe fruit. Wineberries in particular, and figs.

    Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

    Red phormiums.

    Favorite go-to plant:

    Phillyrea latifolia. Left alone it makes the most beautiful small evergreen tree. Fiddled with, it’s brilliant for topiary, cloud pruning, and clipped shapes.

    Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

    I’m still learning it: Soil prep really does matter.

    Unpopular gardening opinion:

    Above: “We recently built a new office extending out into the garden, so this view is only one year old, using one of my favourite trees, Cryptomeria japonica, pruned in the Daisugi style (you can learn about them in our upcoming Niwaki Field Report). They need a year or two to adjust to their new home, the box on the bank needs to settle in and fill out (newly planted box often looks poorly for the first year), but a pick and mix of seeds from Sarah Raven makes it all look nice.

    Conifers are great. Just get the right ones. We moved into a house that was called “Conifers.” I cut down all sorts of classic, ’70s style conifers and promptly replanted with all my favourites. Cryptomeria japonica, Pines thunbergii, Podocarpus macrophyllus—proper tree forms.

    Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

    The mess outside new housing developments. Photinias, phormiums, spirals, and worst of all, chestnut cleft fences.

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  • U.S. Bans TikTok

    U.S. Bans TikTok

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    President Biden signed a bill into law banning TikTok nationwide unless the Chinese company that owns it, ByteDance, sells its stake in the app within a year. What do you think?

    “And with that, Chinese influence over our economy comes to an end.”

    Rowena Marriott, Topiary Clipper

    Uh Oh, You’ve Encountered The TikTok Bad Boys Gang

    “But I haven’t finished radicalizing!”

    Lochlan Robin, Tanning Bed Technician

    “Now the youth will return to the true center of taste and style: Paris, France.”

    Asma Harding, Weight Estimator

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