Why Plant a Hedge in a Pattern You Can Only See From Upstairs? Somebody Was Meant to Look Down

The pattern consists of low hedges, typically of box, hyssop, thyme, lavender or santolina, clipped hard and laid out so that the lines appear to pass over and under each other as a woven knot does. That interlacing is achieved by breaking one line where another crosses it and by using contrasting plants, so the eye reads one band as continuous and the other as passing beneath. The spaces between the lines are filled with coloured gravel, sand, brick dust or low planting, which makes the pattern legible from a distance. The whole design is symmetrical, is contained within a square or rectangle, and is meant to be read as a single figure.

The maintenance requirement is the dominant fact about them:

• •Hedges clipped several times a season to hold the line
• •Replacement of individual plants that die, matching the existing growth
• •Weeding of the infill areas continuously
• •Gravel and brick dust raked and renewed
• •The whole design set out geometrically before planting
• •Boxwood blight and box moth now threatening the traditional plant entirely

A pattern of this kind is unreadable at eye level, since the lines foreshorten into a confusion of hedges, and it resolves into a figure only when seen from above. Sixteenth and seventeenth century houses were built with principal rooms on an upper floor, and the garden was laid out directly beneath the windows of those rooms so that the pattern could be seen as intended by the people who mattered. Raised terraces and mounts were built specifically to provide a viewpoint. That relationship between house and garden is the key to understanding the form, and it is why photographs of these gardens are almost always taken from an upper window.

Designing a garden to be read from a fixed viewpoint recurs in several forms and the examples clarify what the approach is. The parterre developed the same idea at far greater scale, with elaborate scrolling patterns of clipped box and coloured infill laid out across enormous terraces in seventeenth century France, designed to be seen from the state rooms of a palace. Maze and labyrinth designs are read from above and experienced from within, which is a deliberate double reading. Turf mazes cut into grass work the same way. Modern planting designed to be seen from an aircraft or a drone applies the principle to a new viewpoint, and several large-scale land artworks depend entirely on being photographed from above.

The fashion changed decisively over the eighteenth century in England and the reasons were philosophical as much as aesthetic. The landscape movement rejected geometry entirely in favour of apparently natural composition, with sweeping grass, clumped trees, serpentine water and no straight lines at all, and Capability Brown and others removed formal gardens from enormous numbers of estates, destroying most of the surviving examples of the older form. That in turn was reacted against in the nineteenth century, and Victorian and Edwardian designers revived the pattern garden enthusiastically, which is why most examples visible today are revivals of the 1800s and 1900s rather than survivals, and why genuinely early ones are extremely rare.

Low clipped hedges are laid out so the lines appear to interlace, with contrasting plants and coloured infill making the figure legible. The pattern resolves only from above, which is why gardens were placed beneath the principal upper rooms and why terraces and mounts were built as viewpoints. The eighteenth century landscape movement destroyed most early examples, and nearly everything visible now is a Victorian or later revival.