Jessica Seaton, Founder and Managing Director of Toast, on what prompted her interest in organic topiary.

I first encountered cloud pruning during a trip to Japan with Jamie (my husband and co-founder of Toast) at the beginning of last year. I had come across topiary before of course, but the more traditional sort (of rigid chess-men shapes or bird and animal characters) had not caught my imagination as this did.

In Japan it felt different, minimal and calm in its presentation. Each pruned tree had been thought through not just in terms of its own shape, but with regard to how it worked within the surrounding landscape too. These shrubs and trees (Niwaki, as they call them) did not overwhelm the gardens they grew in, they did not fight for attention with each other or the planting around them, rather they quietly emphasised all that was good about the landscape as a whole…