The Devil's Own Art: Topiary in Children's Fiction

At first glance it seems a truth universally acknowledged: the juxtaposition of children and gardens is a wondrous thing. Whether fiction or nonfiction, children's books typically extol the advantages of getting close to nature, watching things grow, taking part in the nurture of plants, soaking up both the healthy benefits of fresh air and sunshine and the character-building rewards of honest physical labor. In children's literature, gardening becomes more than a hobby or leisure activity: it is a form of therapy and self-cultivation. In contrast, fictional literature for adults does not always give the same positive spin on gardens. We become aware of poisoned paradises and perverse Edens where the serpent and flowers coexist: to name but a few, the toxic retreats in Hawthorne's "Rappacini's Daughter," Tennyson's "The Lotos Eaters," or Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine," the morbid gardens of Blake's Songs of Experience, beautiful and damned Manderley in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. Fallen Edens even lose their verdure in texts such as Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden.

Are there any comparably ambiguous or negative evocations of gardens in children's literature? This essay will argue yes—that children's book writers and illustrators have made use of the topiary garden to create an unsettling, surreal, and frightening twist on the concept of controlled yet benevolent nature under cultivation. A skeptic might protest this claim. Surely actual topiary gardens exist for the delight of children! From the grounds of the various Disney Worlds to a 1986 tour de force—The Wizard of Oz done in topiary tableaux at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania—topiary must surely be created by adults to amaze and amuse the child. But is it, and does it? What is it about topiary that some children's writers have recognized to have an opposite effect, menace rather than amusement?

I aim to explore these and related questions in the essay that follows. In doing so, I'll consciously depart from the most familiar form of scholarly writing: choosing an ideological or critical lens, scrutinizing the literary texts from that perspective, and drawing the conclusions that result. Soon after noticing the suggestively sinister nature of topiary in children's books and attempting to account for it, I saw the over-determined nature of the phenomenon. Thus in this preliminary exploration of a fascinating and complex matter, attending closely to concrete specifics and acknowledging multiple and sometimes competing explanations seemed the honest, if messy, means of proceeding. To select one or more theoretical explanations from the many would, at this point in the investigation, be to enact on the subject what topiary art itself performs on plants: a gain in shapely clarity would be offset by a loss in natural complexity. Thus the following two-part piece of writing is something of an experiment in antimethodological methodology. The first and longer part of the essay will offer close readings of various appearances that topiary art makes in children's literature. A short, dense coda will then suggest, without choosing between, a range of potentially illuminating ways to explain the dark side of topiary.

In discussing and portraying topiary in Gardens of Obsession, Gordon Taylor and Guy Cooper spend considerable time on this gardening practice, because the careful pruning, clipping, and time-consuming maintenance of topiary is, by its very nature, an act requiring intense concentration. Taylor and Cooper offer a brief definition of topiary, "the ancient craft of clipping and training trees or shrubs to create living sculptures" (100), followed by a succinct history. Could children be subconsciously aware of the potentially obsessive nature of such gardens? Taylor and Cooper characterize gardens of obsession as "beautiful, bizarre, camp, cranky, delirious, dreamy, enchanting, eccentric, fantastic, grotesque, infatuated, kinky, kitsch, magical, odd, phantasmagoric, quirky, visionary, wacky, and . . . often simply witty!" (8) Three of the obsessively alphabetized adjectives listed above—"dreamy" (although one might be tempted...