The edging ought to be clipped in the winter or very early in spring on both sides and at top; a line ought to be used to regulate the movements of the shears; it ought to be clipped again in the same manner about midsummer; and if there be a more neat and beautiful thing than this in the world, all that I can say is, that I never saw that thing.

A small green edging for a flower bed can hardly be too trim; but large hedges with tops and sides cut as flat as boards, and trees fantastically shaped with the shears into an exhibition as full of incongruities as the wildest dream, have deservedly gone out of fashion in England.  Poets and prose writers have agreed to ridicule all verdant sculpture on a large scale.  Here is a description of the old topiary gardens.

    These likewise mote be seen on every side
    The shapely box, of all its branching pride
    Ungently shorn, and, with preposterous skill
    To various beasts, and birds of sundry quill
    Transformed, and human shapes of monstrous size.

* * * * *

    Also other wonders of the sportive shears
    Fair Nature misadorning; there were found
    Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers
    With spouting urns and budding statues crowned;
    And horizontal dials on the ground
    In living box, by cunning artists traced,
    And galleys trim, or on long voyage bound,
    But by their roots there ever anchored fast.

G.  West.

The same taste for torturing nature into artificial forms prevailed amongst the ancients long after architecture and statuary had been carried to such perfection that the finest British artists of these times can do nothing but copy and repeat what was accomplished so many ages ago by the people of another nation.  Pliny, in his description of his Tuscan villa, speaks of some of his trees having been cut into letters and the forms of animals, and of others placed in such regular order that they reminded the spectator of files of soldiers.[121] The Dutch therefore should not bear all the odium of the topiary style of gardening which they are said to have introduced into England and other countries of Europe.  They were not the first sinners against natural taste.

The Hindus are very fond of formally cut hedges and trimmed trees.  All sorts of verdant hedges are in some degree objectionable in a hot moist country, rife with deadly vermin.  I would recommend ornamental iron railings or neatly cut and well painted wooden pales, as more airy, light, and cheerful, and less favorable to snakes and centipedes.