The distinguished English botanist and horticulturist George Nicholson once described topiary as an ‘absurd fashion of cutting and torturing trees into all sorts of fantastic shapes’. Here, a topiary pig appears in the gardens of the Tudor country house of Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire, forming part of the ornamental planting around the house, an example of the playful and sometimes whimsical forms that persisted in English gardens despite such criticism.