Topiaries

TOPIARIES
            Not far from where I live, a modest house sits among a row of similar dwellings facing an extremely busy street.  The house is distinguished by a pair of potted, spiral-shaped evergreen topiaries that flank the front door, setting off the “Beware of Dog” sign.

            Those topiaries are only the most recent incarnation of a tradition that goes back to pre-Roman times.  In ancient Rome a fashionable property owner might have had a “topiarius” or specially trained slave to tend the “topia” that adorned the north forty.  The names of the slave and his handiwork morphed over time into the word “topiary”–a plant that has been carefully clipped and trimmed into specific shapes.

            Anyone who has ever trimmed specimen shrubs or clipped a hedge into submission is only a few steps removed from the process of creating topiary.  One of the most common shapes is the lollipop-type, featuring a closely clipped ball of fine foliage atop a tall, naked stalk that usually sprouts from a square or rectangular container.  When I was growing up, a man in our neighborhood used to trim his six foot yews so that each upright branch was naked except for a vaguely ovoid puff of foliage at the top.  I always thought that those clipped yews looked like the trufula trees in Dr. Seuss’ classic book, The Lorax.

            As the millennia have come and gone, topiary has gone in and out of fashion.  During the Middle Ages monks kept the art alive in monastic gardens.  As art, culture and learning emerged from the cloisters in the Renaissance, topiary returned to vogue.  The Elizabethans had their intricate knot gardens, sculpting lavender or box into complicated openwork designs.  The art enjoyed a revival in the seventeenth century, but was subsequently swept aside by the eighteenth century landscape movement with its emphasis on doing away with formality in favor of “natural” landscapes.  The long-running Victorian era saw topiary in vogue, then passé, then in vogue again.  A lack of skilled labor after World War I, and especially after World War II put topiary on the back burner.  Now it’s made another revival.  Belgian landscape designer Jacques Wirtz, who is hotter than hot right now, specializes in compositions that include uniquely sculpted undulating hedges.  Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania has an impressive topiary garden featuring fifty different specimen plants clipped into twenty different shapes.  Garden Conservancy founder Francis Cabot flanked the outdoor bread oven at Les Quatres Vents, his Quebec estate garden, with shrubs sculpted to look like giant loaves of bread.  The same area of the property is also home to a knot garden, and a separate garden “room” is adorned with topiary “furniture”.

            One of the more interesting topiary gardens in the United States belongs to Pearl Fryar of Bishopville, South Carolina.  Beginning in nineteen eighty-four, Mr. Fryar, a self-taught gardener and topiarist, began creating living sculptures on the property around his home.  As his output grew in number and complexity of design, so did his reputation.  Now, tour buses are a regular sight on Mr. Fryar’s street, and he lectures and teaches on the subject.

            Topiaries can be large or small, live indoors or outdoors and co-exist happily in almost any decorative scheme.  As I have gone about my holiday shopping I have seen them in high end boutiques, mass merchandisers’ stores and middlebrow garden centers.  The lavender and rosemary lollipop types are far and away the most popular, but I have also noticed lots of specimens made of ivy, boxwood and even coleus.  Any of these small topiaries can spend their summer vacations outdoors on the porch, deck, patio or in your garden.

            If you have been bitten by the topiary bug, getting started is easy.  All you need is an inexpensive specimen plant for smaller creations or a handy shrub for larger, outdoor efforts.  There are a host of topiary books on the market.  Buy or borrow one and look for a shape that pleases you.  It’s best to start with something relatively simple, like a lollipop.  Then, as the plant, grows, you go through the process of clipping off unwanted foliage and shaping what remains.  With a little effort and a lot of patience, you will end up with a striking green accent piece. One caveat–if you are working with lavender, and want your lavender to bloom, you are going to have to let it grow out, which will give the plant a less controlled appearance.  With a little thought, this can also be worked into the design.

            I have a couple of coleus cuttings rooting in an old jam jar in my kitchen.  They are ready to pot up now, and I think that I will try making them into topiaries.  With a little luck I will have a nice pair of coleus lollipops to decorate my back porch next summer.  If that works out, I may go on to bigger and better things like the creation of a green pillar complete with pointed finial at the end of the privet hedge or even a big green bird on the front lawn.  The latter may be too extreme for my little corner of suburbia, but I definitely feel a new obsession coming on.