The traveller Kalm found Privet hedges in Pennsylvania in 1760. In Scotland Privet is called Primprint. Primet and Primprivet were other old names. Box was called Primpe. These were all derivative of prim, meaning precise. Our Privet hedges, new as they are, are of great beauty and satisfaction, and soon will rival the English Yew hedges.
I have never yet seen the garden in which there was not some boundary or line which could be filled to advantage by a hedge. In garden great or garden small, the hedge should ever have a place. Often a featureless garden, blooming well, yet somehow unattractive, has been completely transformed by the planting of hedges. They seem, too, to give such an orderly aspect to the garden. In level countries hedges are specially valuable. I cannot understand why some denounce clipped hedges and trees as against nature. A clipped hedge is just as natural as the cut grass of a lawn, and is closely akin to it. Others think hedges "too set"; to me their finality is their charm.
Hedges need to be well kept to be pleasing. Chaucer in his day in praising a "hegge" said that:—
"Every branche and leaf must grow by mesure
Pleine as a bord, of an height by and by."
In England, hedge-clipping has ever been a gardening art.
Italian Garden at Wellesley, Massachusetts.
In the old English garden the topiarist was an important functionary. Besides his clipping shears he had to have what old-time cooks called judgment or faculty. In English gardens many specimens of topiary work still exist, maintained usually as relics of the past rather than as a modern notion of the beautiful. The old gardens at Levens Hall, [page 404], contain some of the most remarkable examples.
In a few old gardens in America, especially in Southern towns, traces of the topiary work of early years can be seen; these overgrown, uncertain shapes have a curious influence, and the sentiment awakened is beautifully described by Gabriele d' Annunzio:—