About the service
I start every job with a walk around the planting. I look at the species, the age of the plant, how densely it branches near the base and how it came through the winter, and only then do I talk about shapes, prices and dates. That conversation is always an honest one: a topiary form is built up over seasons, not in a single visit. Promising a finished sphere out of a neglected, overgrown shrub in one day would simply be a lie, because a sphere is a dense surface made of young growth, and that growth has to be grown first.
Some plants hold a clipped shape and some plainly do not. Box, yew, privet, cotoneaster, cherry laurel and columnar thuja branch finely and give a solid, readable surface. Species with large leaves, sparse shoots and long internodes will always look loose and gappy, and no amount of clipping will fix that. I say so before the work starts, not after the invoice. I cut spheres, cones, cubes, spirals, low edging hedges and simple figures trained on a frame, and I set the geometry with templates, a plumb line and a string line on pegs rather than by eye.
The calendar of the species decides when I cut. Hard pruning at the wrong time weakens the plant, so the formative cut and the maintenance cuts are spread across the right windows instead of being squeezed into whatever day happens to be free. Tools are disinfected when I move from one plant to the next, so nothing travels from a sick shrub to a healthy one. Work at height is done with a harness, and I never cut anything above power lines.
— site visit, an honest season-by-season plan and a written estimate;
— formative cut: sphere, cone, cube, spiral, low edging, frame-trained figure;
— maintenance clipping through the season, two or three passes for most species;
— sanitary pruning of dead, diseased and crowded growth;
— recovery of a neglected shrub before any shaping begins;
— clippings cleared away, feeding and watering after the work;
— seasonal contract with agreed visit dates.
Some plants hold a clipped shape and some plainly do not. Box, yew, privet, cotoneaster, cherry laurel and columnar thuja branch finely and give a solid, readable surface. Species with large leaves, sparse shoots and long internodes will always look loose and gappy, and no amount of clipping will fix that. I say so before the work starts, not after the invoice. I cut spheres, cones, cubes, spirals, low edging hedges and simple figures trained on a frame, and I set the geometry with templates, a plumb line and a string line on pegs rather than by eye.
The calendar of the species decides when I cut. Hard pruning at the wrong time weakens the plant, so the formative cut and the maintenance cuts are spread across the right windows instead of being squeezed into whatever day happens to be free. Tools are disinfected when I move from one plant to the next, so nothing travels from a sick shrub to a healthy one. Work at height is done with a harness, and I never cut anything above power lines.
— site visit, an honest season-by-season plan and a written estimate;
— formative cut: sphere, cone, cube, spiral, low edging, frame-trained figure;
— maintenance clipping through the season, two or three passes for most species;
— sanitary pruning of dead, diseased and crowded growth;
— recovery of a neglected shrub before any shaping begins;
— clippings cleared away, feeding and watering after the work;
— seasonal contract with agreed visit dates.
