However, clipping is within sight of a revival: a compromise is being reached in which it’s fashionable to make big, clipped, roly-poly, multibuttocked masses in lieu of garden hedges. And maybe, finally, we are starting to see that you can clip shapes out of many more things than just yew, box, holly and bay.
For a start, there are the lesser-known hollies.
Japanese holly (Ilex crenata) has round leaves half the size of box and is good for small football shapes or low hedges. Slow it may be, but it’s certainly dense. The variety ‘Bullata’ has leaves that curl in upon themselves, and if you need it there’s an upright form, ‘Fastigiata’.
We are used to seeing 6ft cones of fancy holly varieties for sale, some smooth, some spiny, and all of them have the same big-leaved holly texture from a distance. What about planting the variety ‘Myrtifolia’ for a change? The leaf is narrow and spiny, but only a couple of inches long. It’s a male clone, I’m afraid, so it will never berry, even with a female holly alongside. It tends to be upright in habit and makes a good pillar — or, if you pinch it out when young, it can be persuaded to fill out and form a dome.
This is true of so many plants. Their natural tendency is to aim fast and high in their youth, and if you give them their head, they will soon become bare at the base. Bareness is no good for clipped shapes, so you have to nip out the tips and make the shoots subdivide and then subdivide again to create a dense cover. After a year or two, with the plant’s energy spread across many leaders, growth steadies and slows down.
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Holly and yew are both good shade-bearing trees, and in the countryside you find them thriving as woodland understorey, so in a shady garden the leaves and the canopy will stay usefully dense. This means that if you want a clipped shape whose underside is on view — a standard sphere on a clean trunk perhaps — then these species will not look bald underneath, even on their north side away from the sun.
You cannot say the same of rosemary. It comes from the sun-baked Mediterranean and yet it can be trimmed into splendidly formal shapes so long as there are no shaded parts. At Iford Manor in Wiltshire there used to be a clipped 3ft pyramid of rosemary planted at the centre of an area of radial paving with seats around it. The canopy was perfect, perhaps because you could sit there contemplating its perfection, nipping off any stray shoot and enjoying that sweet-sour aroma as a consequence. As it was a cone, every inch faced the light: there was no shady underside.
This kind of tight clipping usually stops a plant flowering; that’s one of the payoffs. But it does not have to do so. Osmanthus heterophyllus is an evergreen with small, holly-like leaves, and it’s most often seen in one of its silver- or yellow-variegated forms. I grow it as a fat 5ft pillar, and I clip it lightly a couple of times in the season — say, June and September — and then, in milder spells in late autumn, little starry white flowers open along the sides of the shortened outer shoots.
The flowers may not be spectacular, but the perfume really wafts on the air on sunny days, a scent unseasonably and undeniably of hyacinths. For me, it grows perfectly well in the driest, most rubbishy soil imaginable, alongside yuccas and indigofera. If you hate prickly foliage, you might use instead Osmanthus heterophyllus ‘Rotundifolius’; it has neat, rounded green leaves the size of pennies, and the same sweet flowers in October.
You can clip its sister species, Osmanthus delavayi, into shape, too, but the regime is different. It’s an evergreen with small, neat leaves, and when clipped it will make a tight dome 6ft across in six to seven years. The tubular white flowers are produced in April along the length of last year’s new shoots, and they are wonderfully perfumed. But to get the flowers you have to leave the plant unclipped through the winter (the flowers appear only on the previous year ’s growth). The method is to clip it once in spring, as soon as the flowers are over. This gives you a tight shape through the early summer and a dome of hedge-hoggery through autumn and winter. It’s a nice contrast to tighter shapes.
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In the 18th century, Phillyrea latifolia was a favourite small tree and has rather disappeared during the past 200 years. Goodness knows why: it stands clipping to large shrub size marvellously — perhaps because, like the ash tree, it’s in the olive family, most of which sprout well after hard cutting, even from a big wound made into old wood.
The leaves of P latifolia are toothed, but not spiny, a couple of inches long, and of a wonderful, luscious racing green, brighter than a holly or evergreen oak, yet not at all yellowish. Wonderful. There is a finer, shrubbier, more slender-leaved phillyrea, too — P angustifolia — that has fragrant summer flowers.
Where clipped shapes of a grey-green, silvery or creamy colour are required for a sunny position, it’s worth thinking about Pittosporum tenuifolium.
It’s not a shrub you would use in gardens that are cold and windy, but in hot, dry conditions it’s as happy as Larry. It’s got that rather glittery, small foliage that one associates with New Zealand flora, and it does like full light, so don’t use it for shapes where the underside is on show. You can make quite a tight shape with it by clipping it two to three times during the season, but it never takes on the density of box: it has an altogether fresher looseness that I like.
After all, a tight shape need not go hand in hand with rigidity. When I was a child, my grandfather had a roly-poly hedge of the shrubby honeysuckle Lonicera nitida. It was buxom and bigger than me.
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I loved to slap it with my arm at one end and watch the wave of motion sweep along its length. Irresistible. It made him furious.
L nitida is an old cottage-garden plant that grows like the clappers and needs frequent clipping, so it’s rather despised these days. Yet it undoubtedly has charm. It’s good in unpretentious country-cottage gardens and it doesn’t deserve to be ousted by box just because that’s slower-growing. (Today, it’s even becoming hard to find the ordinary green-leaved version — fancy ‘Baggesen’s Gold’ seems to have taken over.) But if you want some bulbous clipped shapes fast, this is the thing to plant.
This is a plant you can chop away at without worrying, not something you can say for all clippable plants. As a rule, the bigger the leaf and the fatter the stem, the more it becomes worthwhile clipping with secateurs. Hollies are the classic example: you might clip a rough holly hedge with shears and settle for seeing a lot of leaves sliced in half, but a controlled silhouette demands that you run over it with secateurs instead, nipping back all the ends.
In the end, it’s holly, yew, box and phillyrea, the old stagers, that most willingly submit to shaping from mature specimens. It’s possible at this time of year to cut back overgrown specimens, even by chainsaw, and they will still throw out enough new shoots to turn into a smaller, more manageable shape over a few years. Better surely to manage such trees by clipping than lose them altogether.
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Evergreens for larger clipped shapes
Ilex aquifolium ‘Myrtifolia’; Lonicera nitida; Osmanthus delavayi; Osmanthus heterophyllus (‘Rotundifolius’ has circular leaves); Phillyrea latifolia; Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Irene Paterson’
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Evergreens for smaller, finer shapes
Box (gold, silver, large-leaved and columnar varieties available); Ilex crenata; Ligustrum delavayanum; Ligustrum japonicum ‘Rotundifolium’; Phillyrea angustifolia; Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Tom Thumb’; rosemary