GARDENING : Stalking an Ivy-Covered Elephant : Topiary: The art of having animal forms covered with live plants has now spread to indoor decoration. These figures can be bought or you can shape your own.
To most gardeners, topiary is the art of shaping plants into figures of animals or geometric forms by trimming and pruning them, or by making wire frames and planting them.
During the Renaissance, the art of trimming and pruning flourished in the gardens of France and Italy, and today we’re all familiar with the wire-frame topiary creations at Disneyland and Disney World.
But you needn’t own a villa or a theme park to have a green menagerie. And you don’t even have to have a back yard. Small, truly artistic, whimsical and amusing indoor topiaries are beginning to pop up for sale in Southland nurseries and flower shops.
And, better yet, if you want to have some fun and save some money, it’s relatively easy to make your own.
As far as buying ready-made topiaries is concerned, many nurseries and florists carry them, many don’t. If you like hunting, take an afternoon off and stalk the elusive topiary through the jungles of the vendors in your neighborhood.
Or take the easy way and just hunt through the Yellow Pages. You’re liable to bag an elephant covered with creeping fig or spot an ivy-covered monkey. I uncovered these specimens and more in three places during a nursery-hopping safari on the Westside: Armstrong’s Nursery on Sawtelle, Barrington Florist on San Vicente, and Culver Center Flowers on Washington.
The figures I encountered also included jasmine-covered circles, single and two-tiered ivy-covered globes, cats and swans. Armstrong’s even has a few pensive, moss-filled Homo sapiens, which can be purchased either planted or unplanted. Prices ranged from $40 to $260 for the contemplative human figures at Armstrong’s.
An even easier way to buy a ready-made topiary or a topiary frame is to contact O’Farrior Topiary in Glendora. Owned and operated by Jennifer O’Farrior and her sister, Tischa, the O’Farriors have been creating topiary figures for both indoors and outdoors for seven years, from 15-inch rabbits to a 25-foot giraffe.
You can see examples of their larger topiary work at Ambassador College in Pasadena, where there are plant-covered figures of a lion, lamb and a child lurking by the auditorium and at Giorgio in Beverly Hills, where they have seven fantasy topiary trees of various geometric shapes on display.
Among the smaller, perfect-for-indoors figures that are available at O’Farrior are swans, cats, rabbits, monkeys, horses, moose heads (cleverly topped by staghorn fern antlers), turtles, and a fabulous Pegasus, whose wings, mane and tail are “feathered” with flowing variegated Hedera ivy.
Depending upon size, completed topiaries can range in price from $56 for the little rabbit all the way up into the thousands of dollars for custom orders, and the available unplanted frames, which are somewhat larger in size (the rabbit frame is 2 feet tall, for instance) are $75 and up. Shopping at O’Farrior is by appointment only, and the telephone numbers are (818) 963-3568 or (818) 335-4556.
If you want to venture into the limitless field of your own imagination--and save a bunch of money while you’re at it, making your own topiary is lots of fun and easy to do.
According to Jennifer O’Farrior, there are three basic types of topiary frames: One-half-inch aviary wire being preferable to chicken wire because you can get greater detail and definition with it; welded or soldered frame sculptures usually planted with hedging plants, such as boxwood or eugenia or vines, or both--No. 10 galvanized wire is best for this method--and one-half-inch aviary wire lined with moss, soil and then planted.
This latter method is seen most frequently. “Making topiary that way is somewhat like being a seamstress,” say Jennifer O’Farrior, who is the artistic member of the pair. (Tischa is the botanist, with a degree from Cal Poly Pomona.)
Jennifer O’Farrior makes her frames, and you can do the same, by drawing patterns on the aviary wire for individual body parts (arms, legs, bodies, heads, whatever), cutting them out, shaping them, stuffing the individual parts with damp sphagnum moss, then stitching the various parts to the body with wire to form the shape she’s set out to make.
“Actually,” O’Farrior says, “you could buy a pattern to make a stuffed animal and use it to make a topiary.”
Whichever method you choose, once you’ve finished shaping and stuffing your frame, get several creeping fig ( Ficus pumila ) plants or grape ivy ( Cissus rhombifolia ) plants to use to cover the moss. (I recommend creeping fig or grape ivy because they’re easy to grow indoors and will cover the frame very quickly.)
However, many of the commercial topiaries are sold with English ivy ( Hedera helix ) , so be sure to keep those in bright sunlight and spray daily.
O’Farrior also uses various herbs such as rosemary and thyme as well as the traditional weeping fig and ivy. Make holes at least an inch deep for each plant in the damp moss with your finger or a pencil, then take individual, rooted strands of creeping fig or ivy and tuck them through the wires of the frame into these holes. Pin each plant into place with pieces of wire shaped into clips similar to hair pins.
You can, if you wish, cover the moss-filled shape completely, using as many plants as it takes. Or you can cover it sparsely and let nature take its course until the figure is completely covered.
A slightly less complex, but equally rewarding way to make a topiary is to bend a piece of wire, or even a coat hanger, into a relatively simple shape such as a circle or a heart, then cover it with a climbing plant such as wax plant ( Hoya carnosa ) . For example:
Buy a 6-inch or 8-inch pot of H. carnosa with lots of nice, long, trailing vines.
Next, bend a piece of wire or a coat hanger into a circle, leaving about 2 or 3 inches of wire unbent at each end. Stick these straight ends into the pot, right up against the sides, and then, strand by strand, wrap the wax plant around the wire circle. Wrap some green thread or invisible fishing line around the plant to hold it in place. Make sure you trim and prune the plant regularly to keep it from growing off wildly from its circular frame.
How you care for your topiary depends on which plants you use. In almost every case--whether you use grape ivy, English ivy, creeping fig, wax plant or an other small-leafed, low-growing, vining indoor plant--you must spray your topiary every day to keep it from drying out; water it once a week by dunking it in a sink or tub, and feed it once a week by mixing liquid plant food with water and then spraying the mixture onto the leaves of the plant.
