I have no more scruple in using the scissors upon tree or shrub, where trimness is desirable, than I have in mowing the turf of the lawn that once represented a virgin world. There is a quaint charm in the results of the topiary art, in the prim imagery of evergreens, that all ages have felt. And I would even introduce Bizarreries on the principle of not leaving all that is wild and odd to Nature outside of the garden paling; and in the formal part of the garden my Yews should take the shape of pyramids, or peacocks, or cocked hats, or ramping lions in Lincoln green, or any other conceit I had a mind to, which vegetable sculpture can take.
After reading this I saw again some of the true "vegetable sculpture" that I have been fortunate to see; Reed and Lily, a model for ever in stem, leaf, and bloom; the grey Willows of Britain, sometimes lovelier than Olives against our skies; many-columned Oak groves set in seas of Primroses, Cuckoo flowers and Violets; Silver Birch woods of Northern Europe beyond all grace possible in stone; the eternal garland of beauty that one kind of Palm waves for hundreds of miles throughout the land of Egypt,—a vein of summer in a lifeless world: the noble Pine woods of California and Oregon, like fleets of colossal masts on mountain waves—saw again these and many other lovely forms in garden and woodland, and then wondered that any one could be so blind to the beauty of plant and tree as to write as Mr. Sedding does here.
From the days of the Greeks to our own time, the delight of all great artists has been to get as near this divine beauty as the material they work with permits. But this deplorable "vegetable sculptor's" delight is in distorting beautiful natural forms; and this in the one art in which we enjoy the living things themselves, and not merely representations of them!
The old people from whom he takes his ideas were not nearly so foolish, as when the Yew tree was used as a shelter or a dividing line, and when a Yew was put at a garden door for shelter or to form a hedge, it was necessary to clip it if it was not to get out of all bounds. But here is a man delighting for its own sake in what he calls with such delicate feeling "vegetable sculpture," in "cocked hats" and "ramping lions"!
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh