The "Grange," Hartley Wintney
I believe we cut Grass when we want hay, or soft turf to play on, but disfiguring a noble tree is not a necessary part of our work either for our profit or pleasure. Perhaps, as is probable, Mr. Blomfield has never noticed what a beautiful tree a Yew in its natural form is. It is not only on the hills he may see them. If he will come and see them in my own garden in a high wind some day, or when bronzed a little with a hard winter, he may change his amusing notions about clipped Yews.
I think I can give Mr. Blomfield a rational explanation of why it is foolish to clip so fair a tree or any tree.
I clip Yews when I want to make a hedge of them, but then I am clipping a hedge, and not a tree. I hold up "the clipped Yew tree to obloquy," as the tree in its natural form is the most beautiful evergreen tree of our western world—as fine as the Cedar in its plumy branches, and more beautiful than any Cedar in the colour of its stem. In our own day we have seen trees of the same great order as the Yew gathered from a thousand hills—from British Columbia, through North America and Europe to the Atlas Mountains, and not one of them has yet proved to be so beautiful as our native Yew when it is allowed to grow unclipped root or branch. But in gardens the quest for the strange and exotic is so constant, that few give a fair chance to the Yew as a tree, while in graveyards where it is so often seen in a very old state, the frequent destruction of the roots in grave-digging prevents the tree from reaching its full stature and beauty, though there are Yews in English churchyards that have lived through a thousand winters.
A Yew Tree on Mountain, N. England
I do not clip my Yews, because clipping destroys the shape of one of the most delightful in form of all trees, beautiful, too, in its plumy branching. It is not my own idea only that I urge here, but that of all who have ever thought of form, foremost among whom we must place artists who have the happiness of always drawing natural forms. Let Mr. Blomfield stand near one of the Cedar-like Yews by the Pilgrim's Way on the North Downs, and, comparing it with trees cut in the shape of an extinguisher, consider what the difference means to the artist who seeks beauty of form. Clipping such trees does not merely deserve "obloquy"; it is worse than idiotic, as there is a sad reason for the idiot's ways.
If I use what in the Surrey nurseries are called "hedging Yews" to form a hedge, high or low, I must clip them to form my hedge, and go on doing so if I wish to keep it, or the hedge would soon show me that it was "subject to natural laws," and escape from the shears.
What right have we to deform things given us so perfect and lovely in form? No cramming of Chinese feet into impossible shoes is half so wicked as the wilful distortion of the divinely beautiful forms of trees. The cost of this hideous distortion alone is one reason against it, as one may soon find out in places where miles of trees cut into wall-like shape have to be clipped, as at Versailles and Schönbrunn! This clipping is a mere survival of the day when gardens had very few trees, and it was necessary to clip the few they had to fit certain situations to conform to the architect's notion of "garden design." This is not design at all from any landscape point of view; and though the elements which go to form beautiful landscape, whether home landscape or the often higher landscape beauty of the open country, are often subtle, and though they are infinitely varied, they are none the less real. The fact that men when we had few trees clipped them into walls and grotesque shapes to make them serve their notions of "design" is surely not a reason why we, who have the trees of a thousand hills with trees of almost every size and shape among them, should violate and mutilate some of the finest natural forms!