Topiary Slowly Adds Life to Gardens

You’d like to have a cat but you hate kitty litter. You want a dog, but you know when it goes into that “welcome home” frenzy you’ll get a gigantic attack of the guilts for ever having left for work in the first place. You think a tropical bird would be nice, but you just know it’ll learn to swear.

You like animals, but you are not, you decide, a pet person. Buying a beast is not for you.

Then why not grow one?

This is not a pitch for the Chia Pet (which is near the top of the list of worst Christmas presents ever invented, right up there with steel belted radials and complimentary root canals). It’s a look inside one of the oldest and most arresting of all ornamental horticultural practices: topiary.

Topiary may be nothing more than the act of either training or trimming a plant into an ornamental shape but, when done properly and--this is vital--patiently, it can be the jewel of your garden, the one element that will cause the most comment.

Here in Orange County, the topiary mecca is Disneyland, where Ken Inouye, the park’s landscape project manager, presides over a collection of fanciful and intricate animals made from nothing but dense bushy plants and a metal framework.

Disneyland’s topiary plants, most of which are clustered in front of the “It’s A Small World” ride, are examples of the most durable form of the art, and some of them have stood in Fantasyland for more than 30 years. But, he added, the Disney way is not the only way.

Topiary, Inouye said, is most closely associated with classic English gardens, in which dense hedges and bushes were sculpted into geometric and other basic shapes. This practice evolved into more elaborate shapes and a greater variety of plants, until many horticulturists began to sculpt the plants into shapes as intricate as recognizable animals, without any underlying framework.

This is still done, Inouye said, but it involves “training” the plant to grow in specific directions, and the entire structure of the plant is vulnerable to bad weather. High winds and rain can severely weaken a fragile, unsupported topiary plant.

There are a couple of alternatives, Inouye said. One involves literally stuffing a metal framework full of sphagnum moss and growing another plant over the surface. This is, he said, “very labor intensive” and requires close tending.

The more familiar practice, he said, begins with a wire or metal framework in the shape of the object or animal that is fixed to the ground over a seedling plant.

As the plant grows through and around the framework, it is trimmed until the framework is eventually--a word to remember--filled out. The metal frame not only supports the plant in inclement weather, Inouye said, it serves as a kind of template for future maintenance. You’ll know exactly where to trim.

The process begins with plans. Larger shrubs and trees require a stronger frame, and the Disneyland varieties are supported by rods no smaller than a quarter inch, welded into animal shapes.

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For the back-yard topiary gardener, whose plants will be smaller and easier to support, Inouye said hog wire or chicken wire will serve.

A prefabricated framework for the topiary can be purchased at a nursery or one can be built from scratch. To build one, sketch out the shape of the framework--a duck, say--and create a template similar to a dressmaker’s pattern to use in cutting the wire. The framework is then assembled in much the same way a piece of clothing is sewn together, but using short twists of wire to connect pieces.

The framework will also contain limbs and branches of the plant and help them to grow in directions that will most fully fill out the shape.

The framework is then placed over the seedling, but not just anywhere.

“You want it to grow as fast as it can,” Inouye said, “so you want to put it in the place in your yard that will provide the optimum growing condition for that particular plant. You can’t, for instance, grow it in your garage or something and then take it out and put it somewhere else. Everything has to be right.”

The most popular and useful plants for topiary, Inouye said, are “woody” varieties such as eugenia (Inouye rates it as the best), podocarpus, holly and types of conifers such as juniper.

Then, for many gardeners, comes the hard part: patience.

Depending on the size of the plant, Inouye said, filling out the frame to the point where the frame is engulfed by the plant can take perhaps five years of trimming and shaping.

Topiary, Inouye said, is enjoying greater popularity than ever in Southern California, the result of a desire for newer and even more different and unusual garden decorations, as well as the availability of topiary materials, such as prefabricated frames and specialized plant varieties.

Of course, if you like animals but hate pets, and have all the patience of a floor man at the stock exchange, there’s always the Chia Pet, which might be called Topiary Lite. You should be seeing the Christmas ads on TV any day now.