What a wonderful thing it is to fulfill a life-time ambition! I’ve wanted to visit Levens Hall since the early 1960s. That summer, a young English girl arrived in Virginia to spend a year living with me and my family and, as a gift, she brought us a book about English gardens. On the cover…
Do Christmas trees qualify as topiary? We never think of them as such but they fit the definition — the Oxford dictionary calls topiary the “art or practice of clipping shrubs or trees into ornamental shapes.” And surely Christmas trees don’t grow naturally into the perfect cones commonly seen but have been pruned and clipped to shape them. As…
Success comes from three things, Pearl Fryar told me the other day — from work, passion and marketing. Fryar has them all. Pearl Fryar knows what he’s good at and cheerfully shares his knowledge with even a casual visitor like me who stopped by unannounced on a Saturday afternoon. I found him working in the garden but he stopped to…
Strictly speaking, the answer is — no. Both are living sculptures, but they are made in different ways. Mosaiculture is also a contemporary form of plant display, while topiary has a long and distinguished history, dating back to Roman times. So, what are the differences? The most obvious one is that topiary uses a single plant to create…