Tasmania may have lost its native tiger, but in one front garden overlooking the Great Western Tiers, you'll find a herd of elephants.
That garden belongs to keen topiarist Scott Wilson, who has been nurturing the animals—in the form of a hedge—for more than a decade.
Gardener after gardener has been clipping and shaping these same plants for centuries. That kind of lineage in a garden is quite confronting.
'It's a Lonicera hedge that's about 30 metres long. It stood there in the yard when we arrived as a rectangular hedge,' says Wilson.
'I just started clipping it, cutting holes in it in certain places and letting other areas grow and before long we had trunks and ears, and before long we had elephants from head to toe walking across the front lawn.'
If the cities' apartment and terrace dwellers have stacked their limited balcony space with succulents in the last few years, then the houses-with-gardens' folks are bringing back topiary in a big way.
'It's in fashion at the moment because there is a great fashion for very rigid sort of hedges and things like that, which then give way to more fanciful plantings,' says gardening writer Jennifer Stackhouse.
'Very strict hedging can be made more fanciful by incorporating some clipped ball shapes and pyramids, maybe a turret or two—not necessarily going into elephants and birds of prey ... but I think the geometric are very, very trendy.'
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It's not a hobby for the impatient among us, Stackhouse says. She describes it as an optimistic art form—a commitment to a place for better or worse.
'It's something where you are looking to the future,' she says.
'One I saw recently was a teapot [in the United Kingdom] that was to be outside a cafe. I thought to myself: the way cafes come and go in Australia, I wouldn't be expecting many of them to start to make a topiary, which is obviously going to take five to 10 years to be the proper shape.'
Scott Wilson feels that time has flown with his elephants.
'Within a couple of years we had a pretty good shape. You could see definition and outline in them,' he says.
'It's probably been eight or nine years now, I guess, and they're very different to what they were in that first couple of years. It doesn't take very long at all ... it gives you a great sense of satisfaction.'
Stackhouse says that shrubs can live as long or longer than trees, even if a shrub's age is less likely to be thought about.
On her recent trip to Cumbria in England, she visited Levens Hall—famous for its sculpted hedges and gardens.
'Those topiaries date back to the 17th century. There are over 100 topiaries there and many of them have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years,' she says.
'Gardener after gardener after gardener has been clipping and shaping these same plants for centuries. That kind of lineage in a garden is quite confronting.'
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