Cloud clipped yews

click photo to enlarge
I've posted photographs in the past showing yew trees, often grown as hedges, that are clipped into massive, irregular mounds. It is a style popular in the gardens of English country houses. Audley End has a remarkable example, and I've photographed a fine one at Melbourne, Derbyshire. I've also posted an earlier photograph of those at Ayscoughfee Hall, Spalding, that are shown above, though it wasn't as well lit as when I took this shot. What I didn't have when I took those photographs was a name to attach to this particular type of topiary. But now I do.

Looking up some details about what is surely the biggest such hedge in Britain, the example at Montacute House, Somerset, I found a few references describing it as "cloud clipped" and some others that said it was an example of "cloud pruning". Those are both terms with which I am familiar. However, I assumed they applied to yews (and other conifers) where the branches were clipped so that each had a ball or disc of foliage and the whole tree had several irregular balls - like this or this. But apparently it has a wider application. However, I'm not sure it is the best term to describe this "lumpy" kind of topiary. Though many such hedges could be said to resemble banks of cumulonimbus, they don't resemble clouds as well as the cumulus-like examples that I used to think of as cloud-clipped. But, you live and learn!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 16mm (43mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec
ISO:125
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The Much Marcle yew tree

click photo to enlarge
The ancient yew tree shown in today's photograph is estimated to be about 1500 years old. It stands in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, next to the medieval church of St Bartholomew, the oldest part of which dates from about 1230. The tree must have been standing for 700 hundred years when the church was begun, and it is remarkable that it still lives today. Or perhaps not so remarkable when we consider that, in countries north of the Mediterranean, England is second only to Greece in the number of ancient trees (those that are several hundred years old) to be found within its borders.

Much Marcle's tree is justly renowned, not only for its age, but for its girth of 31 feet at a point 4 feet 6 inches above the ground. The tree's trunk, as you can see from the photograph, is hollow, and it is provided with seating that can support several people. In recent years the tree was pruned for the first time in a long time. Six tons of dead and unnecessary timber was removed. When we were there the other day - our third or fourth visit over the years to this interesting village - I noticed a heavy chain wrapped around the tree at a height of twelve or fifteen feet. Its purpose may have been to keep the branches from drooping down to the ground. In a few places it was in the process of being absorbed into the limbs so it must have been there for quite a while.

Ancient yews, particularly those in churchyards have long been noted and revered. In the seventeenth century John Evelyn and John Aubrey wrote about them, and travel writers and antiquarians continued to do so in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century Vaughan Cornish's "Churchyard Yews" (1946) and E.W. Swanton's "The Yew Trees of England" (1958) raised their profile considerably. However, it was "The Sacred Yew" (1994) by Anand Chetan and Diana Brueton (leaning heavily on the work of Allen Meredith) that gained the attention of the media. It catalogued 404 trees that were estimated to be more than 1,000 years old. In 2003 the Ancient Yew Group was formed and continued the documentation of the tree. It has noted 837 "ancient, veteran or significant" yews in England and Wales. Further details about this group and much fascinating information of yew trees can be found on their website.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 2500
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Yew hedges and country houses

click photo to enlarge

A couple of weeks ago I was cutting my side of a conifer hedge that separates part of our garden from a neighbour's. It's about 10 feet high and 50 yards or so long. It took me and my wife a morning of hard work to accomplish the task. My relatively light travails came to mind the other day during my visit to Audley End House in Essex as we took a break from our journey down to London. When I got my first glimpse of the Jacobean country house I was impressed - by the size, symmetry and setting of the building - but moreso by the fine yew hedge that stretched diagonally forward from one end of the main facade.

The hedge must be about 15 feet tall, very wide and many yards long. It is cut in the "bumpy", abstract style that is favoured by many country house gardeners. One often sees topiarised yews and geometrically cut yew hedges in such settings, but frequently these cyclopean hedges feature too. Often they act as screens separating areas of garden or block views that offer little of interest or perhaps an eyesore. At Audley End it serves to mask the hotch-potch of service buildings - kitchen, dairy, laundry etc - from visitors as they approach the front of the house. The hedge, unusually, isn't wholly yew, a few other evergreen shrubs have been allowed to intermingle.

As yew hedges go it's one of the biggest I've come across. Not as big though as this example at Montacute House in Somerset that takes 4 gardeners three months to cut! For a couple more examples of this kind of hedge see this Spalding, Lincolnshire example and this one at Melbourne, Derbyshire.

click photo to enlarge

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Yew hedges, dioramas and blue skies

click photo to enlarge
I'm sure the curators would disagree, but I think quite a few museums have lost their way when it comes to displaying their contents. Increasingly I find buildings where the displays are pared down in a minimalist way, the "educational" is promoted very heavily, and there seems to be an emphasis on style rather than exhibits.

The Victorians got a lot right with their approach: pile in as much as you can, label everything, add a few panels to give background information and an overview, and leave the rest to the visitor. One of my favourite London collections is the Sir John Soane Museum. It holds the artefacts amassed by the neo-classical architect, and though it was put together just before the Victorian period, it follows their approach to display.

In my youth I visited York reasonably regularly, and in that city the Yorkshire Museum was a magnet for me because of its collection of stuffed birds. Courtesy of Victorian "collectors" (whose methods of shoot and stuff I deplored) I got to see many species that I would otherwise never have set eyes on. Not only extinct birds such as the Great Auk, but also the extreme rarities that pass your way only occasionally or never. These were usually presented singly or in groups in glass cases. There seemed to be room after room of such exhibits, broken up with the odd diorama showing a bird, such as the black grouse, against a painted backdrop of its habitat, with a few plants and rocks scattered about. In fact, that was my introduction to the word "diorama", and its a word I only occasionally came across in subsequent years. Today, in museums, the diorama as a method of presentation seems to be viewed as old hat.

However, the word has made a comeback courtesy of photography. By a trick of lenses and software, people have devised a way of giving a real scene the appearance of a diorama. By adding foreground and background blur the impression of a shallow depth of field such as is found in close-up photography is achieved. This tricks the brain into, on first viewing, seeing the photograph as a set with models: see examples here and here. I understand that the Olympus PEN range of cameras have the facility to create these built into them as an effect. The only question I have is, "Why?" I can see that it's a trick that is easily done, but what is its purpose? I can't think of a use to which I would put it, so its reason is lost on me.

What has my photograph of the top of a yew hedge* against a blue sky with white clouds got to do with dioramas? Well, it occurred to me that the photograph could be mistaken for a view of the jungle-covered hills of somewhere such as New Guinea. Which would make the image something akin to a "reverse photographic diorama"!

* See another of my images of a yew hedge cut in this traditional manner here.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 28mm (56mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A yew avenue

click photo to enlarge
A path flanked by yew trees is one of the most commonly found routes across a churchyard into an English church. Such an avenue typically starts at the principal gate into the churchyard - frequently a lych gate - and extends to the most used main entrance, which is usually in the south porch. This places the trees on the south side of the church where they benefit from full sun. An avenue of this sort will have been deliberately planted for the stately note that it adds to the location. I don't know whether large country houses or churches were the first to feature yew avenues, but those two locations (along with municipal cemeteries and crematoria) are just about the only places I find them. The other reason they are chosen is that they are seen as very traditional - a "progressive" church is unlikely to plant such an avenue, or to be very keen about keeping an existing one, usually preferring something more colourful or more obviously environmental. A yew avenue will last for many years - many centuries in fact - and requires regular clipping to keep it from growing too high and from intruding onto the path. I have seen churchyards where these trees have outgrown their location, and the solution has been to cut them off near the base. Far from finishing them off this drastic action encourages new and vigorous growth that can be cut into the shape that the trees had in their youth.

I've spoken elsewhere about the reasons why yew is a preferred species in English churchyards. I've also mentioned (probably more than once) how trees planted on the south side of the church prevent a photographer from using the best position for a shot of the whole building: the south east corner of the churchyard. A yew avenue rules this particular image out completely - and, being evergreen, does so for the whole of the year! However, when the sun is in the south, and shadows are falling towards the church, a yew avenue offers an image like the one above with a formal pattern of trees and shadows leading to the church building. Here at Skendleby, Lincolnshire the final composition doesn't have a focus quite as interesting as this one at Pilling, Lancashire, but I took the shot nonetheless.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 19mm (38mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Big hedge

click photo to enlarge

"Love thy neighbour, yet pull not down thy hedge", Old English Proverb

The saying above has a French version: "Hedges between keep friendships green", and both echo the oft-quoted, "Good fences make good neighbours". That being the case, what are we to make of the hedge shown in today's photograph? Its function doesn't appear to be to encourage a proper neighbourliness, so much as banish everyone and everything from sight. Looking at its height and undulations, "hedge" seems be a misnomer for this edifice constructed out of rows of yew trees grown closely together, and clipped as one structure when their foliage met.

It can be found in the grounds of Ayscoughee Hall, Spalding, Lincolnshire. This building, erected as a house in the early 1400s, and given to the town in the early 1900s, is now a museum with public gardens. However, the hedge must date from its time as a private residence. Research shows the yew trees date from successive plantings, the oldest probably being eighteenth century. It is cut in a way that is fairly common in the grounds of large English country houses (and churchyards), and fulfils the purpose of dividing up the gardens, screening one section from another, acting as a wind-break, and providing a mountainous backdrop against which plants can be displayed. Oh, and it offers gardeners a scary few weeks teetering thirty feet up on ladders as they give it the annual cut!

Impressed by the oddness of this living barrier I decided to show something of its scale by including two people sitting on one of the nearby benches.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 108mm (216mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8.0
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Pan

click photo to enlarge

Statuary has a long tradition in English gardening, but it reached its high-point in the eighteenth century. The Renaissance had begun to impinge on this island's artistic sensibilities from the sixteenth century, and took a stronger hold in the seventeenth. But it wasn't until the Georgian period that it ruled supreme. Then Classical architecture, art and mythology were the reference points for everyone who wanted to create a country house with landscaped grounds.

Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire has 98 acres of gardens and grounds that feature sculpture at every turn. The landscaping was designed in the twentieth century on eighteenth century principles (though the house dates from the twelfth century with additions from many later centuries). The skilfully placed statues include a lead group by Cheere, a marble Apollo of 1765, mid-eighteenth century busts of Roman emperors, urns by Scheemakers and Delvaux, and much more. They also include the statue of Pan shown above. This Greek god of shepherds, flocks, mountains, hunting and rustic music is generally known for two things - his sexuality and his pipes. At Anglesey this piece is one of a pair that face each other across a narrow path through a yew hedge. The yew has been deliberately and skilfully grown around the statues making them look like they are emerging from the foliage. They seemed to me to be less well-used than they might be in this tight location, so I took this shot of one of the pair to show him off to better effect against his green background.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 13mm (26mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/25
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On