I thought I already pruned my shrubs in a fashion reminiscent of the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket – but that was before I went to Japan! In fact the first thing I did when I arrived home from the airport, after a month long garden-tour of the Land of the Rising Sun, was grab my hedge-trimmer and shave another two inches off the entire garden.
You see the problem with most Australian gardeners, is that they’re afraid of the blade.
Perhaps it has something to do with their long tradition regarding the use of steel, going back to the time of the Samurai, but as far as plants are concerned the Japanese are the polar opposite to us. Although, the disparity in the quality and sharpness between Japanese gardening shears and those munching implements Australians are used to using may also have something to do with it. That is to say, Australians fear of the blade is not entirely irrational because of the actual damage they’ve seen their blades do to their plants. And I use the term ‘blade’ very loosely in the Australian context here as they are really more like hair-crimps than blades, to be blunt – pun entirely intended. Or, at best, they begin their life as blades but rapidly degenerate into something akin to hair-crimps due to the poor quality steel used in manufacturing most of these inexpensive gardening tools ubiquitous in hardware stores all over the Country – one large green coloured shed in particular springs to mind which shall remain nameless except to say it begins with a B and ends in an S. Is it any wonder that after Australians have finished trimming their hedges with these cheap and nasty products they stand back horrified to see something that looks more like a large herbivore has chewed it over, digested it twice, then regurgitated back in the same spot.
Of course, I am generalising a tad here, as the availability of better quality gardening tools has improved in recent years and even the big-barn BS chain stores do stock these, including the Swiss made Felco secateurs (steel from Switzerland isn’t far behind that from Japan) – however, you’ll have to ask for these from behind the counter, as they’re no longer left out on the shelves because there were thieving gangs of blue-rinsed grannies roaming the aisles surreptitiously slipping them into their handbags it would seem. I guess the fortnightly pension didn’t quite cover the hundred-dollar price tag! A hundred dollars for a pair of secateurs! I hear you scream. In answer to that, all I can say is you get what you pay for – or in the case of the light-fingered aforementioned octogenarians, you get what you’re willing to nick.
Now just to clarify here, I’m not suggesting you go out and prune all your hedges with a pair of Swiss-made secateurs, or even the slightly larger Japanese-made hand-held hedge shears. And although I do own both, I only ever use these for small ad-hoc jobs (ie. tidying up a single shrub or small tree for instance). Suffice to say, when I descended on my whole garden with a vengeance immediately after returning from Japan I didn’t use either – no, I pulled out the big gun – that is, my Stihl long-arm battery powered hedge trimmer (and yes I know the petrol version is an even bigger gun but the new lithium batteries currently on the market aren’t far behind in terms of power it must be said). Plenty of other middle tier brands like De Walt, Milwaukee and Makita are also more than serviceable, and available to buy at BS (also an apt acronym for a certain two-word phrase but let’s not go there). But when it comes to heavy-duty large scale hedge-trimming, Stihl is the top-shelf option in my book – after all, the Germans know their way around a steel blade as much as the Swiss and Japanese do.
So what did my garden look like after said trim-fest by me doing my best crazy-eyed Jack Nicholson impersonation throughout, to reference another Kubrick masterpiece? Well, everything looked a bit more Full Metal Jacket and a bit less Jack’s hair-style in The Shining. But there was method to the madness, because I did the post-Japan chop in early Autumn, and then did it again in late Spring and now it’s mid-Summer and my garden looks exactly like those Japanese gardens I drooled over so unashamedly nine months ago – and now the gestation period has ended and yours truly, Joelson the Niwaki pruning master has been born! Although I use the Japanese term Niwaki very loosely here as it literally translates to ‘garden tree’ and encompasses everything from Bonsai to Cloud-Pruning standard size trees which is not what I’m referring to in the context of my garden. Instead I’m talking about tightly clipping shrubs (many of which are natives such as Correas, Callistemons, Leptospermums, Grevilleas, Banksias etc) to various sizes and heights, within a range of between 1m-3m from the ground, so that they resemble something akin to a landscape of rolling hills all merging into each other when viewed from the main vantage points of the house and garden seating areas. The main reason I do this is to achieve a perfect balance between maintaining privacy and bringing in the borrowed landscape of distant mountain-views beyond our property boundaries which you can read more about in my other Blog article Why Block It When You Can Borrow It.
However, there are two other very important reasons I topiarise shrubs into solid looking spherical shapes in the Niwaki method (ie. in addition to clouds and rolling hills, think forms like boulders, pillows and potatoes).
The first is for the aesthetics of the look they provide, particularly when contrasted against wilder looking non-topiarised plants in the garden (especially those with starkly different habits such as trees, grasses and strappy leafed flowering plants etc). The sharp outlines these tightly clipped shrubs make also help to frame the borrowed landscape beyond as they clearly delineate the space between the foreground of your garden and the distant background.
The second important reason for topiarising is the practical benefits this brings both to the shrubs themselves and the person responsible for maintaining them. That is, a regularly pruned shrub will always be healthier and more resistant to pests, diseases and environmental stresses simply by virtue of the fact that they are in a continual state of renewal, regrowth and solidity of structure and shape.
On the flip side, a shrub that is never trimmed but instead is left to its own devices invariable grows long, leggy and runs out of steam much quicker than a clipped one. Of course, a caveat should be put on this advice that there are some shrubby plants that can be a bit touchy when it comes to pruning too hard (eg. Diosmas, Pittosporums and Lavenders in particular), but even these can be topiarised in the same manner as long as they are clipped throughout their life from juvenility rather than being left to grow out leggy before a fatal attempt is made to try and bring them back into shape. However, in the main, most woody shrubs (especially natives like Correas, Callistemons, Leptospermums etc) can be cut right back and remodeled into the aforementioned desired pillow, boulder, cloud shape over time – note that patience is a virtue in this regard though as they will look somewhat unsightly for a six-months or so immediately after the hard-chop, but once the new growth comes then you can just start regularly shaping with the hedge trimmer and in a year or two you wouldn’t even know it used to be a scraggly leggy unloved specimen.
Now before you dismiss all of this because you’re one of these people who just hates topiary or has a general aversion to ball shapes and sharp lines in the garden, I implore you to read on because in the next few paragraphs I’m going to change your views. Or at least try very hard to.
Let me start by saying that if I walk into a garden and all I can see from one end to the other is a collection of tightly clipped ball shaped shrubs of uniform size and nothing else then I too begin to feel bile rising up my esophagus. One of the key tenets of good garden-design is a thing called ‘balance’ and when you simply repeat exactly the same thing everywhere then you will be unlikely to achieve it. Although you may counter by saying “but I just love a wild-looking free flowing rambling garden”, which is fine to a degree, but again if that ‘wild-look’ constituted the entirety of your garden then it is merely the flip-side of the exclusively clipped garden already described (ie. it is unbalanced).
Order must always be balanced by some chaos, and vice-versa. Of course, you may argue that nature itself is beautiful without the intervention of humans and their mechanical hedge-trimmers and if you go out into a wildflower meadow or a tropical jungle you won’t find spherical shapes or sharp lines there. Well, that is a valid observation up to a point. But even the apparent chaos of nature is kept in check by some order. In the absence of humans, animals and birds prune trees and shrubs to a degree and healthy ecosystems ensure that balance and harmony is maintained so that no one species of plant proliferates to dominate the landscape. Sometimes ecosystems become unhealthy and unbalanced, often due to human intervention it must be said, where diseases, pests and monoculture invasiveness arise, but a vibrant and diverse natural system will generally always guard against this and maintain balance and harmony by itself. And yes this healthy natural ecosystem can be recreated on a smaller scale by humans and is very often done so by permaculturists for instance where they create organic ‘food-forests’ with minimal pruning and weeding and simply leave it all to the whims of nature – a genuine workable ‘thing’ for sure, but that is not what I’m talking about here. (Although you can read more about permaculture-design aka ‘non-design’ in my other Blog articles on these topics). No, what I am talking about here is garden-design, which, by definition, requires the balancing of order and chaos by the hand of human-intervention.
Or to put it more bluntly (there’s that unsubtle pun again), what I’m talking about is the type of garden I actually want to look at and actually want to live with. If I was to embark on creating a totally wild sprawling permaculture food-forest I wouldn’t do it anywhere near where I actually live (ie. if I won lotto I might buy a separate plot of land to do such a thing, or in the vastly more likely scenario of me not winning lotto I could envisage volunteering my time to live in a permaculture commune in the holidays or something like that). But as far as my own garden is concerned I will always maintain balance and harmony in its design and function. Yes I have many tightly clipped topiarised spherically shaped shrubs where they serve a purpose in that form, but I also have many that have been left to their own devices where the alternate purpose is required. Simply put, the topiarised forms look better against the foil of the non-topiarised forms because of that thing called balance and harmony. Or to put it another way, if I topiarised everything or didn’t topiarise anything at all, then both extremes would result in my garden not being as aesthetically pleasing as it currently is because it wouldn’t be in balance.
Similarly, and I know this next point diverges from the ‘trimming’ theme of this article but I’ll make it quickly all the same – good garden design always needs to balance the practical against the aesthetics as well, which is why I have a clothesline where I could otherwise have grown an attractive and fragrant Star Jasmine climber; why I have soccer goals in the middle of my front lawn which also has dead patches from excessive soccer-related foot traffic (although the aesthetics will one day take precedence over the practicalities in this case as soon as my boys move out of home and I returf the lawn!); why I have veggie gardens in an area where I could instead have more ornamental plants if I didn’t have a practical need to grow my own food; and why, for the same reason, my back garden includes the relatively unsightly structure of a chicken-enclosure (although even this is screened from view from the house at least by the strategic planting of a bottlebrush hedge in front and a grapevine over the top of it).
But back to my promise to convince you that regular trimming of some, but not all, of your evergreen shrubs is an absolute necessity if you want to have a balanced and harmonious garden. Have I succeeded? Are you about to rush out to the garden shed to grab those hedge trimmers, just as I did as soon as I returned from my Japan trip? If not then here is one final point of persuasion for you. Even if you still don’t agree that your garden will look vastly better with a mixture of topiarised and non-topiarised plants (and don’t answer this for at least a couple of years until after you have actually done it), you surely must agree that your garden will at least look vastly better with more small birds in it. And take if from me, small birds absolutely love flitting in and out of tightly clipped shrubs. In fact, as I type these words now, I am watching one of my larger Correa Glabra boulder shaped shrubs shimmying and rustling as if its alive or being wobbled about by the wind – yet there isn’t a breath of a breeze out there today and now what do I see suddenly emerging from it – not one, not two, but three exquisite Silvereyes darting out from it straight into the topiarised Tea-Tree right next to it.
So next time you’re hesitating in uncertainty and trepidation don’t be – shake off that fear of the blade and do like the Japanese do – Trim, Trim and then Trim Again!