Both Mark and I burst out laughing when we heard a quote from the late Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter fame, one of England’s premier gardens and gardeners. “People are always looking for low maintenance and easy care gardens,” he said. “Personally I am of the view that if you love what you are doing, higher maintenance is more interesting.” We could not agree more.

Topiary is a tradition which has not been greatly embraced in this country although it has a long and honourable history in Europe and Asia. It is neither instant nor low maintenance so maybe it has just never fitted the quick and easy tree and shrub style of gardening favoured here. It was Hollard Gardens in Kaponga which first aroused our interest in the use of the heavily clipped punctuation mark shrub to give form to an otherwise loose planting. Subsequently we have realised that this draws on overseas gardening traditions and that there is a place for heavy clipping and shaping without going overboard and thinking that an entire garden must be forced into clipped submission.

The traditional candidate for clipping in Britain is the yew. With its dense growth, tiny leaves, ability to regenerate quickly from bare wood and its longlived habit in their climate, it is perfect. There are reasons why we don’t see many yew trees here. They just do not like our heavy rainfalls and given ground which can stay wet for months the roots give up the ghost. Even quite mature trees can suddenly up and die on you. We recently lost a mature golden yew of some fifty years from our rockery. One month it was vigorous and healthy and next month it was clearly dying. It battled on a while longer, putting out new shoots from the base before it decided that it simply decided it no longer wished to inhabit this earth. It is dead and we won’t be replacing it with another yew tree. We do still have a surviving green one of a similar vintage. It must have developed a major lean in its early years and these days we clip it hard once or twice a year to accentuate the diagonal angle. It resembles a kiwi shape.

Buxus is the preferred clipping candidate in this country. It is pretty forgiving and if you pick the reasonably strong growing sempervirens form, you can get clipped balls, pompoms and shapes in a fairly short space of time. While we have a couple of clipped buxus hedges here and one large clipped buxus dome, we are not particularly enamoured of box and would not plant any more. It is a bit dull really.

The New Zealand yew equivalent is none other than our native totara. It too has tiny, dense foliage and will resprout from bare wood. If you have a spare decade or two and visualise yourself gardening long term, the totara will reward you. While it may be a forest giant when left to its own devices in the wild, it is easily contained in the garden situation by regular clipping. Miros and matais are other native trees which will take topiary or shaping and, to our eyes at least, are a great deal more interesting than buxus. I have a little series of matai balls on 120cm standards which are responding to clipping most rewardingly. I was given a form of dacrycarpus dacrydiodes from Paloma Garden in Wanganui. A witches broom of the magnificent kahikatea or white pine, it is very dense and slow growing and offers itself as another indigenous candidate for clipping.

If you have big, chunky camellias in your garden, you have the raw material for clipping in situ. It is not always easy to know what to do with a big blobby camellia but they can be splendid clipped. When starting from scratch, I would advocate a quick growing but small leafed variety such as tsaii, Fairy Blush or Cinnamon Cindy. But as the smaller foliaged types have only become popular in more recent years, established garden camellias are more likely to be larger leafed japonica types. These are a bit more problematic to shape but do not let the challenge put you off. If you get it wrong, they will grow again. In fact, if you cut them off at ground level, most will regenerate and keep growing. Not even Round Up kills them.

Working with a bigger leafed variety, leave the hedgeclippers to one side for as long as possible. Cut leaves look worse when they are large and twiggy stumps are more obvious. Start with trying to get the shape right from the middle, cutting off wayward branches flush to the trunk. Take out branches which cross or which are clearly growing in the wrong direction for the shape you plan. Prune back growths which are too long. Remove all dead wood. If you are careful with your cuts, it is possible to do this exercise without it being particularly obvious and it should not look like butchery. Then prune back the leafy stems with secateurs, again trying to cut flush with the stem so it is not obvious that you have been cutting it. The aim is to encourage dense foliage growth but in the shape you want. If you are twitching to use the hedge clippers, then restrict yourself to the time after flowering and before the new growth appears or when the soft new leaves are in full growth. At these times, the plant will soon cover the rigours of your assault on its foliage with the clippers.

Don’t be too ambitious from the start. There is considerable skill in clipping spirals, chickens, peacocks, hunting scenes and the like and they are not usually achieved by working with a plant that is already mature. Keep to an obelisk, a mushroom shape, cones, pillars or big balls. Clouds may be achievable if you are confident. Be prepared for it to take a couple of seasons to get the shapes right because the plant may need to thicken to fill in some bare areas. But the reason for this train of thought is that the time for the first clipping of a camellia is straight after flowering with a tidy up in spring when it has put its new growth on. As many of the sasanqua camellias are now starting to pass, you may like to pause and look at them and ponder a little judicious pruning and shaping. It is more fun than weeding.

I have written before about the native falcon which wreaks havoc on Mark’s poor innocent pigeons. Four ring necked doves on about their third day of freedom was the worst incident recently. But Mark, in a desultory sort of way, has been encouraging the dog to take an interest in protecting the birds. When the dog unleashed an intense volley of barks the other morning, we both rushed out to see what was upsetting him. Sure enough, he was warning of the falcon perched in the silver birch tree, waiting for his breakfast to make an appearance. How is that? An ornithologically abled dog. I was impressed. Mark did admit that he doesn’t always get it right and that he will sometimes woof at the odd suspicious looking seagull flying over but for a skittery Sheltie to be able to identify a falcon with any degree of accuracy is fairly remarkable and in fact beats many humans.

But back to gardening. I have only ever been into a couple of private gardens without a house. Generally these happen because the owner is dead keen to get the garden established but is not yet ready or able to build the house. And there is an odd feeling of something missing, especially when the garden is quite well established. Private gardens are different to public gardens in part because somebody lives there. It was for this reason that we argued strongly that Tupare and Hollards needed a residential presence maintained even though the original owners have long since shuffled off their mortal coils. The residence gives a heart to a garden.

Noted English gardener and writer Rosemary Verey (she of Barnsley, as in Lavatera Barnsley, fame) was fond of saying that “the garden should curtsey to the house”. It does help to have a house that is worth curtseying to (naturally Mrs Verey had a splendid English manor house of considerable charm and stature). It is somewhat more problematic if what you have is a characterless box which comprises the majority of this country’s housing stock. But the principle of integrating house and garden remain. In modern parlance, it tends to be referred to as indoor outdoor flow but that only tells half the story. That ability to move freely and with convenience from the living areas and often the master bedroom through to outdoor living areas is pretty much the norm with modern house design and where renovations take place in older houses.

Having been raised in a succession of older character homes and now being a current resident of a house which was designed before the whole concept of indoor outdoor flow became mandatory, my experience of that flow has largely been going out the windows (fortunately the downstairs windows are quite low in the current house). And when I think about it, I can recall our children climbing in and out of windows too. It doesn’t always do the paintwork and the window latches much good but it sure beats trailing around to one of the distant doors at times.

But the constant joy of our home is how well set it is in the garden, and for this we give all the credit to Mark’s parents and their study of the English gardening traditions. All the rooms in this two storied house command wonderful garden views and no matter how long we live here, I am sure our eyes will always be drawn to the garden vistas out of every window.

In terms of drawing the eye outdoors, it doesn’t matter if you live in a colonial mansion or a modest Beazley. It is only looking back the other way (from the garden to the house) that you notice what the house looks like. And with winter here and the nasty cold, cutting wind of last weekend, it is not a bad time to take a few minutes to stand indoors at each window in turn to contemplate the outlook.

There is a tendency in New Zealand to keep vegetation and garden well clear of the house so that it stands in splendid isolation on an apron of seal and grass. By contrast, the English country tradition is to garden right up to the house which gives intimacy and charm and allows greater integration of house and garden. .

We have never gone as far as attempting to match the garden colours to the interior. Personally I think that is getting just a little bit precious. Besides, I am not a great fan of green, orange, scarlet, shocking pink or lemon yellow as indoor furnishing colours but I am quite happy to use them in the garden. By chance we have one room where the soft pink and blue interior tones are echoed in the pretty garden outside its windows but truly, it is not the colour continuity that establishes the flow and draws the eye outside but the design.

Where possible, the long vista does more to attract attention and draw the eyes to look beyond. And of course the aforementioned Mrs Verey, being an English country garden specialist, advocated those longer vistas to attract people out to explore. A path leading to a destination which is not immediately visible is an obvious example. Gardens need some elements of mystery and surprise where not all is visible at first glance.

On a typical town section, the long vista is not as easy to achieve unless you can borrow the view from your neighbour’s property or you adjoin a reserve. But this does not mean that you can’t achieve an interesting outlook in most situations. The bedroom window which looks out to a tall boundary fence two or three metres away is more problematic but with creativity, espalier and a focal point to attract the eye, even this can have a view of sorts. The focal point does not have to be an ornament or pot. It may be a clipped plant or a splash of colour.

All of this presupposes that most people do look out their windows. If you are of the net curtains or venetian blind persuasion, you may focus your attention indoors from preference. But if you enjoy looking outside, take the time to stand awhile and look from all the windows in the house. It is not so much a matter of the garden curtseying to the house perhaps, as the garden delivering views from all the windows. If you can achieve this, it is a daily delight and even more so in winter if you don’t like to be out in the cold.