CLIP ART

In deepest December Charlotte Molesworth’s garden in the Weald of Kent has an eerie beauty. ‘The thing about topiary is that it does come to life in the winter. In the summer it’s slightly lost in the exuberance of everything else,’ says the topiary gardener, as I spy stray tendrils disrupting the smooth surface of a box bird, and bare branches of deciduous trees making wispy auras around the heads of tiered evergreen pyramids. You can peer at the view through naked spheres of thorns and cloud-pruned shrubs.

It’s a cold day, three weeks before the end of the year, and like many of us, Charlotte’s mind is on the future. ‘My question, at the moment, is how I take this garden forward, and what will its fate be.’ While many