We are already performing a co-ordinating role. We are bringing interested bodies in the US, UK and Europe together by circulating scholarship in a range of fields. We are setting up national collections of box in different countries and initiating disease research. We also have strong ambitions to record and archive dying horticultural skills around the world.

EBTS is also keen to extend the range of focus. We must ensure that topiary is not merely viewed as the trimming of box and yew into teddy bears. Topiary is as much about shaping hedges and trees in the landscape as it is about individual shaped, specimen shrubs. The Society would like to see the art of living three-dimensional sculpture developing with extended abstract shapes, as landscape art in the manner of Charles Jencks' large-scale landscape environments. Examples on a smaller scale are Piet Oudolf's wave hedges in Holland, Jacques Wirtz's fluffy cloud hedges in Belgium, the great hillside giant hedge tunnel with its cathedral like inner chamber at the Casa Mateus in Portugal, and all those endless ancient overgrown yew hedges which follow their own huge organic shapes with some superficial trimming by intrepid mountaineering topiarists.
For the Society to grow, we urgently need to extend our services and usefulness to enhance garden culture and values everywhere. We must constantly think of ourselves as European and act globally.

Bruce Ginsberg