Les charmes dans la cloître

Monday started with trimming hedges. I was given a pair of hedge trimmers, some overgrown but very square hornbeams about 3 feet tall, and 30 seconds instruction on how to get straight lines. I would have felt better if they had been in a different spot, because they were certainly in a prominent spot in the garden.

The hornbeams are against the wall just offscreen to the right.

You'd think that after all my horticultural practice, I wouldn't be intimidated by the simple task of hedge trimming. But I prefer to search for plants that have pleasing shapes naturally, and let them take care of themselves. Their method here, is to cut a small swath along the whole hedge, just along the edge, step back and check by eye to see if it is straight, make any necessary adjustments, then shave the rest of the side off in reference to the established line. There's lots of stepping back and pondering seriously involved. Once the side is finished, you move to the top and do essentially the same thing. The top would be much easier for me to prune if it was a waist height, but I'm not that tall. So instead, it falls mid-rib height. There's nothing wrong with this, except doing this clipping for a long time (getting one side of the garden done took me until well after lunch), my arms felt like they were going to fall off. So afterwards, I got to edge some lovely circles around more topiaries and ruthlessly destroy the weeds until they look like this:

Not a weed in sight. Because I murdered them.

The more exciting thing that was happening at the same time, was the the main gardener, Cyril, was putting together scaffolding so he could trim the tall hornbeams in the cloister (the name for this level of the garden) while I butchered the short ones. They started off looking like this:

Look at them, all fuzzy and overgrown.
You can see the ones I trimmed in the back against the wall.

And they ended up looking like this:

Military-precision haircuts for everyone!

I learned that the tall hornbeams only get pruned twice a year: once in June, and again in August. I'm a little fuzzy on whether the short ones I was working on get pruned more often since they're more accessible. Tomorrow promises the exact same trimming for me with the other side of the cloister.