The house directly across the street from us had very pleasant (to our eyes) front yard plantings - including a somewhat columnar evergreen near the front door and 3 mop cypress nearer the driveway. They had a fall cleanup done by a service, and now the columnar evergreen has a flat top you could eat off of and sharp corners you could cut yourself on, and the mops are perfect balls.
Walking the dog, we noticed a number of homes in our area have this sort of “overly manicured” plantings.. I suspect a major reason we see so many is that a landscaper lives in the area, and his house’s bushes are as tortured as can be. I suspect many of the neighbors hire his firm and simply express no opinion as to how the trimming should be done. I’m a tad surprised, tho, because many folk moving into our neighborhood seem to be addicted to all things HGTV - stained brick, farmhouses on steroids, etc. And I would have thought that this landscaping style would be considered somewhat dated.
Do you see a lot of tortured bushes around you? Do you personally like that style?
Topiary looks good in large, formal gardens I think. It’s a bit pretentious in a regular domestic setting. We’ve got hedges that need to be kept clipped into form (or they would soon not be hedges), but they are far from formal or manicured.
I dunno. If people like it, more power to them. It’s pretty harmless.
I certainly was not trying to suggest that anyone should be prevented from trimming their shrubs however they wish, or that excessive manicuring was harmful. Just seeking insight as to why folk would consider that attractive.
Likely falls into the “different people have different tastes” category. But I still occasionally wonder WHY folk have their particular taste.
Manmade stuff is neat & square & spherical & symmetrical. Natural stuff is … scraggly.
Humanity has spent millennia “taming” and domesticating nature. It’s what we do. Good bet all those plants are non-native species to your area.
Said another way, all suburban landscaping is fake manmade man-controlled psuedo-nature. We’re simply discussing exactly how far along the spectrum of fake any particular installation sits.
Lotta folks love to not only control things, but overcontrol them. Good bet the folks with highly symmetrical topiary are in that mental class. Their kids probably aren’t allowed in the living room either where the never-used couch sits as a monument to domestic control over a set-piece room for guests who never come.
I never liked it. I heavily prune my bushes so they will have lots of light and air, I remove any spindly growth and prefer a more natural shape. On some of my bonsais on occasion I would hold back on the water until they started to wilt badly and then cover them with loosely piled hay and light it n fire. Then fertilize and water. I love that natural look.
It’s not prevalent in my neighborhood. I do like it when I see it, it’s visually interesting to me. If everyone did it I assume I would tire quickly of seeing it.
We not only have the tortured bush topiaries in everyone’s lawn around here, we have at least one neighbor who keeps reporting us to the lawn police for not joining them and having a contract with one of the lawn services. Every goddam morning hordes of exploited immigrants arrive in big trucks, fan out, and start up their leaf blowers. It sounds like an invasion of wasps and ruins sleep for anyone not on a “wake up at 7:30” schedule.
Our yard looks like this:
Neighboring yards look like this:
When the town code enforcement officers (aka the Lawn Police) receive a complaint, they go to the address reported and look for anything they can write the property owners up for; it isn’t against code to not have your plant life turned into giant replicas of plastic Monopoly™ tokens, but they write us up for having LEAVES in our yard or they photograph the stems of our day lilies and irises and refer to them as grass that’s taller than you’re allowed to have your grass. Wrote us up once for not having a tarp over our woodpile in our back yard.
What kind of tree is the bigger deciduous to the left of your front walk? Its structure looks really cool.
Ours is kinda between the two. A more obviously planned planting scheme, but the individual plantings are maintained in a less manicured habit. I admit, it does take a bit more attention and effort to basically trim each bush limb by limb, than to simply shear them.
WRT landscaping, I think a significant factor is than many people simply do not SEE it. As far as they are concerned, so long as what is outside is “something greenish”, it is good enough. Just a very different perception than mine.
My landscaping mentor always said if you like the geometric look, just paint large balls and squares green and put them where you want them. Guaranteed to last longer and be easier to take care of.
I do not. I don’t have a strong opinion about bush trimming one way or the other but AHunter3’s look seems more appropriate for a rural setting. If the rest of the neighborhood looks like the neighbors, I can see the issue. That said, it wouldn’t bother me enough to report it.
The dead grass is not a good look either. However, being in property maintenance might color my view.
I’m a plant lover/collector and would appreciate the tree/shrubbery in a distant view of the back yard, but I think you need to do some pruning there (the plants will love it) and getting things lower will let you enjoy them easier.
Pruning is a fun, artistic (bonsai) endeavor. Plus, those bushes give bad guys plenty of cover to case your place.
If you want to plant, then ignorethat plant for the next 20 years, you need to select some dwarf varieties.
You see it all the time here in the desert. I call the results “gumdrops”, the technique “poodle pruning”. It’s fast and easy for the landscapers - just fire up the hedge trimmer and you’re done a bush in less than a minute. I instruct my landscape company to hand prune only (other than a tall oleander hedge impractical to hand prune), and early every spring to cut back 50% on most shrubs. Shrubs should have depth - leaves throughout the plant, not just a thin layer on the surface.
Its well understood that this sort of thing is a scam by Big Topiary to require you to always employ professional gardeners. They lost so much of their income when domestic push mowers came onto the market, that they have looked at every possible scam to make you feel you need a pro to come in very 2 weeks.
Though to be fair, torture by a professional gardener is nothing compared to the pain and suffering inflicted by an amateur with a hedge-trimmer and the long wait for it to grow back out.
The photos AHunter3 posted of his neighbors’ properties don’t show topiary - they’re examples of meatball shrub pruning by neatniks (nudniks?) whose sense of order is reinforced by such massacres.
True topiary is a semi-art, though possibly too disturbing for suburban neighborhood HOAs to tolerate (this is a from a dedicated topiary garden in Columbus, Ohio).
Risqué topiary might be fun in a relaxed setting.
Similar controversies involve topping of trees and severely cutting back crepe myrtle trees and shrubs - so-called “crepe murder”. They’re bad for the health of trees and shrubs and also look like crap.
Of all the examples I’ve seen in this thread, what I’d pick for my own house if I had one is the tortured bush. What I’d prefer most of all, though, is dense topiary consisting of only right angles. it really complements most varieties of Modernist architecture.
