Otago Peninsula
Margaret Barker has a trick to keep her yews trim and slim.
They are in the Larnach Castle Garden, and had got too fat; this increased girth had spoilt their looks. I thought that these formally placed trees required a crisp and tailored outline.
We had seen in the French garden, Vaux-le-Vicomte, yew topiaries cut back so drastically hard that they had assumed a brown and ghostly look. All of the green growth had been removed so that the topiary fitted into the template that the gardeners fitted over the trees.
After travelling together with these Americans, looking at and learning from French gardens, I flew with them to northern California.
My American friends took me to Filoli, a splendid formal garden just south of San Francisco. Do go to see this garden if you ever have the opportunity. The country house is set in 16 acres of formal gardens, surrounded by the estate, which sprawls over 654 acres. These friends said that the over-large upright yew trees were being heavily pruned to shape and that I could watch and learn from the gardeners there.
I came. I saw. I learnt how to prune a yew tree.
Do you remember the 1980s television series Dynasty, with Joan Collins playing the wicked Alexis Carrington? The opening shot was always of the magnificent Carrington home as seen from the air. Rows of stately yew trees paraded in the garden. This shot was of Filoli and these were the yews that I was taken to see as they were being pruned back to shape.
Two people were working together to prune these trees, a young man and a young lady. The young man was in charge and he was using hydraulic power tools which saved on the wear and tear of the operator. The young lady was left to use the hand tools. A circular template was laid on the ground and these gardeners were cutting the yew trees back to fit within the template. Because the same template was used for tree after tree, all of the trees matched exactly.
When I returned home to Larnach Castle, with lots of fresh ideas, I engaged a tree surgeon to cut back our elderly and obese Irish yews.
I shared with him my photographs of this operation as it was performed at Filoli. Our enterprising tree surgeon used a bit of Kiwi ingenuity and went one step better than the Americans. He designed and made, in his father’s workshop, a circular template on a tripod with a pulley. He could then pull the template up the tree. Well!
He was a perfectionist too. All of the cuts to the wood were made facing outwards and sloping down. He also tied the branches in with a cord so that they would not splay outwards when it snowed.
After this operation, he fed the trees with nitrogen. In spring there was a fuzz of new green growth on the skeletal frames of these heavily pruned trees.
Yew (Taxus baccata) can be cut back hard.
You can do that even into old wood and it will recover except in climates which are particularly cold. Other conifers can’t be cut back into the old wood like this. This is because they, mainly, can’t regrow from old wood.
Some decades have past and now these Larnach Castle yews have gone and got too fat again. ✤