I met some stunning potted floribunda rose bushes today, each one topiarised to lay flat against what was once a boring house wall, but is now a blaze of buff and pale blush roses.
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Best of all, each rose was planted in its own large pot, so if/when the rose owner moves house, they can take their topiary rose hedge with them, and make yet another dull wall totally gorgeous.
Topiary is the art of cutting plants into the shape you want them to be, not the shape they'd prefer. A gentle or productive prune isn't topiary - to topiary properly, you must have a shape in mind.
Topiary was well and truly an art form by the days of Caesar Augustus. The first European writings about it date from around then, but gardeners were so obviously highly skilled that it must have originated far earlier.
By about 1600, wealthy Europe had gone gaga about privet or box trees wired into the shape of galloping horses, unicorns, or elephants, or having entire gardens geometrically shaped into spheres, triangles or peculiar looking nobs above knobbly hedges.
I suspect the earliest topiary began because canny farmers noticed that fruit trees next to walls survived winter better with the reflected heat and retained warmth of the wall, and that fruit like apricots ripened earlier if the tree was pruned to lie flat against a wall, and all surplus leaves and branches that might shade the fruit were removed.
Today's potted roses had little trimming - just that one side cut completely away, so each bush lay flat against the wall. The rest was left to grow as bushy as it liked, which given the loss of the other half of the rose, was very bushy indeed. Floribunda roses tend to be leafy and bushy. I don't think a hybrid tea rose would give the same effect, though they might still be lovely.
That wall was simply stunning, especially as the terracotta pots were much the same colour as the wall. It also made me rethink topiary.
Topiary against walls is usually a thin hedge shape, trimmed on both sides to make a flattish plant. In fact trees and bushes can be pruned to make a fence. Just trim them and twine their branches together. You won't need wire or fence posts, and they will even keep cattle and horses out - or in. Today's topiary made me realise that simply cutting one side flat, and leaving the rest to bush, can be very effective indeed. It is also less work.
READ MORE: JACKIE FRENCH
We don't currently have any topiary. A topiarised early ripening variety of peach fell victim to our living room extensions. A topiarised honey locust fence was deemed highly successful in terms of keeping away possums and potential apple thieves from the trees behind it, but its thorns were a definite danger to kids and anyone short-sighted, or who wasn't looking where they were going.
If you're into topiary unicorns, go for a small-leaf bush or tree like box, for easy shaping. There are new varieties of box that grow much faster than the old-fashioned ones, though you need to prune more often to keep them in shape.
Topiary sasanqua camellias are popular fence disguisers this millennia, and if carefully pruned will cover your fence in green leaves all year, and flowers for about three months. Topiarised calamondins - calamondins look like cumquats by grow faster, are hardier and fruit nine months of the year - are also excellent topiarised against a wall, easy to prune, with glowing leaves and orange fruit.
I wouldn't bother with topiary apricot trees though - they are all very well in Jane Austen, but in Canberra a topiarised apricot tree is like building a highway for your possums so they can pick the fruit more easily.
The easiest way to turn a wall into a garden, of course, is to grow a rambler over it - a rose, perhaps, though they will look bare in winter. Some roses keep their leaves longer than others. Lady Bank's rose tends to stay garmented for most of the cool weather. Other choices are perennial climbers like Chinese jasmine - birds love to nests in their thickets. Avoid common jasmine which attempts to take over any garden it's planted it. Pandorea jasminoides, a relative of the native wonga vine we have here, can look superb, with giant white and purple-red smudged blooms. But you can't take fence covering climbers with you when you move.
Those pots of floribunda roses just need a strong back, a wheel barrow, and maybe a ute to carry them to their new home. Ten minutes from parking the car, the topiary hedge would be in place again, without the drop of a flower bud.
You'd have an instant flower garden - and it would look gorgeous.
This week I am:
- Not putting in purple sprouting broccoli, or Romanesco broccoli, even though they look elegant, but broccolini, which is more tender and delicious, and you need pick only as much as you want for dinner every night all winter.
- Hoping we eat the first ripe cobs of corn before the bush rats do.
- Trusting that our nocturnal visitors are bush rats, not feral black roof rats, but I'm not going out with a torch at 2am to check the length of their tails, much less check their teeth.
- Trying to find a place for a very vigorous rambling rose that a friend gave me a cutting of in winter. The bush grows enormous; the blooms are small and pink and flower for ages, but once it's in, it's going to have to stay there, as no one will want to hack the monster down.
- Eating Jonathon apples, at the perfect time to pick them, and eat them, and make maple syrup apple cake.
- Planting tamarillo seedlings so they will be metre-high gifts to give away come December.
- Rubbing the wooden garden furniture with "outdoor garden furniture oil" so it keeps its true wood colour as long as possible, and well as stopping wood rot.
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