No longer belonging exclusively to the mazelike gardens of European castles, topiary is a miniature fantasy waiting to come to life in any home or apartment.
Topiary is the art of shaping plants, by careful pruning or shearing, into various forms or objects, from geometrics to animals.
Abbie Zabar grows a topiary garden of potted herbs on the terrace of her duplex apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City.
A distance of light years in lifestyles away, Barbara Gallup lives on an island in the Delaware River in New Jersey surrounded by a menagerie of topiary companions.
Both women have recently written topiary books that focus on new looks with an ancient craft.
Zabar`s space-saving pots of lavender, rosemary and other herbs combine function and fantasy for urban windowsill horticulturists and balcony botanists. They offer fragrance, architectural accent and a harvest every time they are pruned, she says.
”I`ve worn the lavender in my hair, and I like to press a sprig of rosemary into my letters. I tie a very, very thin satin ribbon around it,”
says Zabar, an artist who illustrated her book, ”The Potted Herb” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $14.95).
Many of the stuffed topiary animals in the whimsical style Gallup specializes in designing appear in back yards and bay windows-as well as in elaborate public gardens.
And for those so bereft of a green thumb that even their silk flowers wilt, there`s ”instant” topiary, trendy arrangements of fresh-cut foliage or flowers that cover a frame and find their way to dinner parties, weddings and everyday interior decor. Wreaths fall into this category, of course. In their book, ”The Complete Book of Topiary” (Workman Publishing, $10.95), Gallup and co-author Deborah Reich suggest easy-to-make small animal frames carved from florist`s foam for ”instant” topiary.
Chicago`s Ronsley Inc., for example, has been called upon to design a champagne glass, ballet slippers, a pizza and various corporate logos in flowers. ”We recently did the Olympic rings for an Olympics party,” says Jim Dilldeck, director of sales. Topiary arrangments cost $250 to $350 for a table centerpiece.
The ancient Egyptians sculpted trees into topiary forms. Hedges grown into elaborate mazes, bushes clipped to resemble stacks of geometric blocks and plants whimsically cut to the shapes of animals, teapots or crowns became part of the European topiary tradition. Today American gardeners are rediscovering and redefining this craft. Less is more in American topiary. Folk art animals are often whimsical petites, and geometric sculptures stand as regal miniatures.
The term topiary covers a variety of looks: a formal bank of evergreens clipped to resemble an arched colonnade or a simple geranium pruned to the shape of a pompon atop an arrow-straight stem. Vines or trees trained so they grow as two-dimensional designs is another style of topiary called espalier. Potted topiary includes plants growing into frames or plants growing from the frames themselves, as Gallup`s figures do.
”If you see a plant and it speaks to you and says, `I`m a bird,` or whatever, just go for it,” and shape it that way, Gallup advises.
”Knot gardens of herbs were developed in medieval Europe for walled cities. Now they`re coming back because people want formal, low-maintenance gardens. And more and more people want a harvest,” says Reich, a landscape designer based in New York City.
Portable, stuffed figures are a new look in topiary and ”truly an American form,” she says. ”We can`t trace it back much farther than the 1950s or `60s, and it has really taken off in the last five years.”
Gallup`s and Zabar`s books are just two of the new crop in the topiary craze. Other recent releases are ”Creating Topiary,” by Geraldine Lacey
(Garden Art Press, $29.50), and ”English Topiary Gardens,” by Ethne Clarke (Clarkson N. Potter Inc., $24.95).
THE SECRET INGREDIENT
The real secret to growing topiary of any size is love, says Gallup, who custom designs each of her wire frames, which start at about $150 for a tabletop-sized topiary pet. The large figures cost approximately $1,500.
Gallup created an orchestra of eight lions for the Baltimore Symphony`s 50th anniversary. For a fisherman`s birthday bash in New York, she seated topiary rabbits with folded legs on silver ice buckets, fitted them each with a fishing pole and dropped the lines in goldfish bowls. Two rearing topiary horses flank the fireplace for parties at home.
Zabar has dozens of uses for the crop of herbs she harvests with every
”haircut” she gives her topiary to keep trained in the shapes of spirals, spheres and cones.
Some of the herbs go into rosemary sauce, herb butters, sage potato crepes and a variety of other dishes for which she includes recipes in her book. But Zabar also enlists her herbal sprigs for garnishes, centerpieces and fragrant sachets.
”If you have a dinner party, you can wrap a little bundle of herbs for each place and tell people it`s something you cut from your garden,” Zabar says. She weaves them into wreaths, wraps them around the base of candles and arranges them on the dinner table next to the dish they season when she entertains.
It`s the elegant and whimsical decorative touch that has contributed so mightily to the resurgence of interest in topiary. Howard Haffenberg`s large
(about 3 feet high) topiary rooster often comes in for dinner parties, and his wife, Jacqueline, fills her 1 1/2-foot-high topiary basket with flowers for a centerpiece or drapes the table with strands of ivy.
”If you have a full plant of ivy, you can have instant topiary” by anchoring the bottom prongs of a frame in a pot and winding the strands around it, says Jacqueline Haffenberg. She does this every year with a Christmas tree frame that has small candleholders built into it.
But Haffenberg notes that ”instant” is a relative term in this case and assumes you already have grown the long bushy stems of self-branching ivy. Ivy cascades from pots down a fence like a rippling green curtain at the Haffenbergs` suburban home. Like the topiary basket and the 12-year-old rooster, the pots of ivy move indoors and out in summer as they are included in various decorative motifs. These and their other topiary creations retreat to the house and greenhouse for winter.
NOT COFFEE TABLE ART
The thing to remember is that a plant can`t grow in the middle of a room on a coffee table, says Elise Felton, a Chicago area horticulturalist who consistently carries off prizes at plant shows and competitions.
”People who want topiary just for a decoration are better off getting plastic plants,” she says.
Felton spends eight hours every day with her plants that spill over from a greenhouse into her front and back yards, where she keeps an alpine garden, wildflowers, annuals she grows from seed and topiary of every variety. From the 7-inch standard of Prince Rupert geranium to the wall-size espaliered orange tree, the sculptural array gives Felton`s home the look of an artist`s studio. Walking through her gardens is enough to get the most dormant green thumb aching for a clay pot and some soil.
Felton`s hands never seem to leave a plant. She constantly stops to water, prune or check on them as she moves through her garden. She clips small stems with manicure scissors and large ones with heavier shears but never electric cutters. She trains the trailing stem of a topiary turtle to the moss body with small-gauge hairpins, a ”must” in the supply kit of topiary growers. She recommends the smallest leafed variety of any plant species for successful forms.
The jubilee ivy (Hedera helix ”jubilee”) stretching across the 1 1/2-foot-high turtle has been growing for three years. The rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) stretching upward from a pot across a spiral frame has been growing even longer. ”I started this plant from a rooted cutting in 7-82,”
she says, reading off the identification stick; she has one for every plant.
The turtle grows from a moss-filled frame with the ivy growing directly out of the moss. The spiral frame is propped in a pot, and the plant grows up across the frame from the pot. The Haffenbergs` rooster was grown this way, and the stems rooted in the pot appear as its feet beneath the foliage.
Gardeners can grow whimsical topiary figures in two ways. The first is to root a plant in a pot and use a frame with prongs that can be propped in the pot as well. The plant grows up into or around the frame to create the shape. For stuffed topiary, the plant is rooted directly into the moss that fills the frame and grows from that as a self-contained shape.
Everyone agrees that the plant growing into a frame but rooted in a pot is a much surer bet for the beginner than growing the topiary from the moss-filled frame. ”With the stuffed topiary, if you forget to water it, that`s it,” Howard Haffenberg says. It can dry out enough to wither in a day.
”When you grow them inside, you have to be able to water them somewhere where the water can drip,” Jacqueline Haffenberg notes. Days before she entered a topiary rabbit in an annual plant competition at the Chicago Botanic Garden, she placed it on a counter in her light and airy kitchen and told her family to ”spray it every time you walk near it.” The rabbit won the top prize.
When you grow them outside, remember that most topiary figures must come in for the winter. That makes a foot-high topiary puppy more practical than larger figures for most home gardeners.
For example, the the core of a 5-foot topiary camel at the Chicago Botanic Garden is filled with polystyrene ”popcorn” to cut down on weight, but such a large creature still weighs several hundred pounds. Wanda Supanich, who supervises the educational greenhouses and choreographs the creation and care of topiary at the garden, says, ”We had to move the camel in with a hydraulic lift.” –
