Topiary Nursery (1960)

Topiary Nursery in Crawley, West Sussex. M/S of a field of small bushes; a man, Stephen Gelder, enters shot and starts checking individual bushes; he finds one he likes and sets his clippers down on the ground. M/Ss and C/Us as we see him winding wire around the bush and fixing a wire framework to it. Commentator tells us a tree is often 30 to 40 years old before Stephen starts to build the desired shape (in this case a bird) over his own wire framework. Stephen starts snipping away at the top leaves. M/S in another part of the nursery as we see a woman cutting a bush in a tub. There are several other shaped bushes around her. Another woman comes into shot, puts two flowering plants in pots on the ground and starts to snip and clip one of the other bushes which is already in a kind of basket shape. She then places the two plants in the ’bush-basket’. M/S of Stephen snips furiously away at a bush, turning it from a pyramid into a spiral in a matter of seconds! C/U of the bottom of a bush (I’m n