2024 Topiary Award Winners – To Paradise and Beyond
Picture above – Owen Simpson, Managing Director at Henchman, with winners Harrie Carnochan and David Hawson and TOPIARIUS Editor Elizabeth Hilliard
By Elizabeth Hilliard, Editor of TOPIARIUS
The prizegiving of the UK’s first ever national topiary awards took place on Saturday 6th July 2024, a day of torrential rain and magical sunny spells, at RHS Hampton Court flower festival near London. Such was the success of this year’s awards that Henchman now hope to expand them across the Continent to our other EBTS countries.
It was the brilliant idea of Henchman, those makers of outstanding lightweight gardening ladders, to create a nationwide competition for creative topiary. The Henchman Topiary Awards 2024 were open to all within the UK, in two categories of entrants, professional gardeners and home gardeners. Highly desirable prizes included a ladder and other excellent Henchman equipment, a year’s membership of the EBTS and an EBTS outing for two. Runners up received copies of TOPIARIUS. The response was fantastic – many dozens of entries including a huge range of forms demonstrating British gardeners’ love of ‘clipping plants for aesthetic effect’ (which is the EBTS definition of ‘topiary’). Several EBTS members entered, but many of you missed this opportunity. We hope you’ll enter next year…
Many and varied were the stories which entrants told about how and why they came to create their topiary entries. One described diving with sharks on the Great Barrier Reef – and coming home to create a topiary shark. Another works in a care home and makes topiary to enliven the lives of residents looking out of the windows. Some topiary was made in response to the site – including one gardener who was determined to make something of an awkward space between a wall and a car park. Plant materials were varied, including Lonicera nitida which is brave as it grows so fast it must need clipping almost every growing month! Throughout, the joy of topiary could be heard in the voices of entrants, each of whom could write about their work as well as submit photographs.
I am Editor of the EBTS annual journal TOPIARIUS, and was invited by Henchman to be one of four judges of their awards. The other judge who was present at the prizegiving was Owen Simpson, managing director of Henchman. Sadly unable to join us were Andy Bourke, Instagram star known as ‘The Hedge Barber’, and Michael Buck, head of horticulture at Creepers Nursery. Entries were evaluated against a comprehensive set of criteria supplied to the judges, designed to assess their creativity, craftsmanship and overall impact. ‘Each winning sculpture is a testament to the creativity and skill that’s out there across Britain’, says Clare Lenaghan-Balmer, head of marketing at Henchman.
Home Gardener
Winner of this year’s home gardener prize is EBTS member David Hawson for his fabulous storytelling yew hedge at Paradise Cottage, his and Susie’s home in Aberdeenshire. On one side of a central arch is the tale of Moby Dick, on the other a pageant of British birds. You will be able to read all about David and his hedge, and enjoy terrific photographs, in the 2025 issue of TOPIARIUS, our EBTS exclusive membership magazine, but here are a couple of photographs to entice you. If you are reading this and are not yet a member of the EBTS, hurry to join at www.ebts.org. If like David you are a home gardener, I recommend the bargain 5-year membership for £100 (also saves having to renew each year), and membership can also be given as a wonderful gift.
Professional Gardener
Winner of this year’s professional gardener prize is Harrie Carnochan, expert topiarist maintaining the magnificent formal garden at Pitshill, a private house near Midhurst, Sussex, laid out by Simon Johnson, who himself won a Georgian Group award in 2017 for the restoration of house and garden. Once a formal topiary garden has become established, it is easy for it to thicken up and gradually lose focus over the years – I have seen this many times. Additionally, outside contractors brought in to maintain such gardens can do damage because they do not understand topiary and topiary plants. But this garden is a beauty, crisply defined and elegant, for which all credit goes to Harrie and head gardener Hugh. I was delighted that Hugh was also present with us at the prizegiving. Read about Harrie and this garden in next year’s TOPIARIUS. If like Harrie and Hugh you are a professional gardener, or a student or run a horticultural company, there is a tailor-made EBTS membership option for you too at www.ebts.org.
Press interest in the topiary awards includes the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, the BBC and Aberdeenshire’s Press and Journal. It’s frustrating that none of them mentions the EBTS, but the FT did at least mention TOPIARIUS, and we can but hope that the current trending of topiary in general benefits us in the long run. Present at the prize giving was journalist Sophie Elmhirst who is shortly submitting a report and photographs to the New Yorker – if and when this appears we’ll let you know. Such is her enthusiasm that she had already travelled to Aberdeenshire to see David Hawson’s winning hedge for herself.
In addition to the two main winners of the topiary awards, there were four runners up and a special prize winner chosen not by the judges but by the team at Henchman – see the other report for details of these five topiarists.
To round off the day at Hampton Court, in one of the dry spells when we were spared monsoon-like torrential rain, winners David and Harrie had some fun selecting which Henchman ladder to choose as their prize. David is tall, but the ladders were taller! Harrie (also tall) tested out ladders by climbing up them, watched by Henchman MD Owen. I congratulate both David and Harrie, worthy winners, and look forward to next year’s exciting entries in the Henchman Topiary Awards.
The full list of winners of the inaugural Henchman Topiary Awards 2024
Professional Gardener
Winner: Harrie Carnochan
Runner up : Chris Reeve
Highly commended: Simon Newman
Home Gardener
Winner: David Hawson
Runner up: Petra Hoyer-Millar
Highly Commended: Hugh Johnson
Henchman Choice Award
Keith Miles
