{"id":70,"date":"2007-12-11T08:19:28","date_gmt":"2007-12-11T16:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=70"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:25","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:25","slug":"topiaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/topiaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Topiaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

TOPIARIES
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Not far from where I live, a modest house sits among a row of similar dwellings facing an extremely busy street.\u00a0 The house is distinguished by a pair of potted, spiral-shaped evergreen topiaries that flank the front door, setting off the “Beware of Dog”\u009d sign. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Those topiaries are only the most recent incarnation of a tradition that goes back to pre-Roman times.\u00a0 In ancient Rome a fashionable property owner might have had a “topiarius”\u009d or specially trained slave to tend the “topia”\u009d that adorned the north forty.\u00a0 The names of the slave and his handiwork morphed over time into the word “topiary”\u009d–a plant that has been carefully clipped and trimmed into specific shapes.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I always thought that those clipped yews looked like the trufula trees in Dr. Seuss’ classic book, The Lorax.<\/em> <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As the millennia have come and gone, topiary has gone in and out of fashion.\u00a0 During the Middle Ages monks kept the art alive in monastic gardens.\u00a0 As art, culture and learning emerged from the cloisters in the Renaissance, topiary returned to vogue.\u00a0 The Elizabethans had their intricate knot gardens, sculpting lavender or box into complicated openwork designs.\u00a0 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”\u009d landscapes.\u00a0 The long-running Victorian era saw topiary in vogue, then pass\u00c3\u00a9, then in vogue again.\u00a0 A lack of skilled labor after World War I, and especially after World War II put topiary on the back burner.\u00a0 Now it’s made another revival. \u00a0Belgian landscape designer Jacques Wirtz, who is hotter than hot right now, specializes in compositions that include uniquely sculpted undulating hedges.\u00a0 Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania has an impressive topiary garden featuring fifty different specimen plants clipped into twenty different shapes.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The same area of the property is also home to a knot garden, and a separate garden “room”\u009d is adorned with topiary “furniture”\u009d.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One of the more interesting topiary gardens in the United States belongs to Pearl Fryar of Bishopville, South Carolina.\u00a0 Beginning in nineteen eighty-four, Mr. Fryar, a self-taught gardener and topiarist, began creating living sculptures on the property around his home.\u00a0 As his output grew in number and complexity of design, so did his reputation.\u00a0 Now, tour buses are a regular sight on Mr. Fryar’s street, and he lectures and teaches on the subject.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Topiaries can be large or small, live indoors or outdoors and co-exist happily in almost any decorative scheme.\u00a0 As I have gone about my holiday shopping I have seen them in high end boutiques, mass merchandisers’ stores and middlebrow garden centers.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Any of these small topiaries can spend their summer vacations outdoors on the porch, deck, patio or in your garden.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If you have been bitten by the topiary bug, getting started is easy.\u00a0 All you need is an inexpensive specimen plant for smaller creations or a handy shrub for larger, outdoor efforts.\u00a0 There are a host of topiary books on the market.\u00a0 Buy or borrow one and look for a shape that pleases you.\u00a0 It’s best to start with something relatively simple, like a lollipop.\u00a0 Then, as the plant, grows, you go through the process of clipping off unwanted foliage and shaping what remains.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With a little thought, this can also be worked into the design.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have a couple of coleus cuttings rooting in an old jam jar in my kitchen.\u00a0 They are ready to pot up now, and I think that I will try making them into topiaries.\u00a0 With a little luck I will have a nice pair of coleus lollipops to decorate my back porch next summer.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The latter may be too extreme for my little corner of suburbia, but I definitely feel a new obsession coming on.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TOPIARIES \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not far from where I live, a modest house sits among a row of similar dwellings facing an extremely busy street.\u00a0 The house is distinguished by a pair of potted, spiral-shaped evergreen topiaries that flank the front door, setting off the “Beware of Dog”\u009d sign. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Those topiaries are only the most recent … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1709,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/1709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}