WE don’t know who first looked at a bush and thought: ‘That would make a good rabbit.’ But we do know it was a long, long time ago. The Romans certainly indulged in topiarisation, which they seem to have picked up from the Greeks, and it seems likely that the Ancient Egyptians were snipping away even before then. As the garden designer Isabel Bannerman says in her latest book, Husbandry (Pimpernel Press, £14.99), topiary is both timeless and contemporary. ‘It somehow “peoples” the place and commands a garden from it.’
Over the centuries, a love of topiary has come and gone, occasionally rising to excesses of enthusiasm before a reaction set in. In about
AD100, Pliny the Younger described
