Topiary now much more than shaved and shaped trees, shrubs

ST. LOUIS — It may be time again to make order out of chaos in the garden.

That’s long been a classic gardener’s goal: to tame nature, to reduce it from a state of native wildness to a form that meets the needs of the man or woman tending it.

Early Romans were among the first to carve shrubs and trees into outdoor works of art. They rendered boxwood into sailing ships and trained cypress trees to represent hunting scenes.

The resulting forms earned them the Latin name “topiarii” (meaning landscape gardener, from “topiarius,” a word related to such complicated outdoor work).

Edward Scissorhands, watch out.

Today, topiary is back, bigger and better than ever.

And it’s not only the historically based shaved and shaped trees and shrubs (although you see these fronting many a home and apartment building these days).

It’s also English ivy trained on wire globes.

And it’s the dark-green perennial Wilson ivy (Hedera helix ‘Wilson’) and the euonymus ‘Coloratus,’ with reddish-purple foliage in winter.

It’s the more tender African mallow, with dazzling pink flowers throughout the growing season that may be trimmed in spring to train into standard topiary.

Or it’s tropical firecracker vine, also called Manettia inflata ‘John Elsley,’ twining with tiny, hummingbird-friendly, red-trumpet blooms around a wire obelisk.

Plenty of plants make for good topiaries.

Plenty of gardeners do, too.

“It kind of goes hand in hand with people wanting to do more container gardening,” says Cindy Gilberg, an owner of Gilberg’s. “They’re using a lot of plants potted in various shapes, some of them even those Victorian-style urns.

“We’ve kind of gotten away from the wild look,” she adds. “That is what I’m seeing.”

The alternative, she says, is “not really a true formal garden but more of a garden with form.”

Topiary spirals, for instance, might look “neat sometimes if someone has columns on their house and they try to repeat that shape with plant material.”

Not to mention fun.

“I don’t think topiaries have ever entirely gone out of style,” says Chris Kelley of Cottage Garden. “Topiaries just seem especially hot now,” she says. “They’re not only for holiday time but also as fantastic focal points for exterior gardens — big things, like a huge obelisk done with manettia and thunbergia vines, and not just 24 inches tall but a 4- or 5-foot job.”

You can’t get much more fun than the new flamingo topiary forms that Alison Courtney, of Timber Creek/SummerWinds garden center in Ellisville, Mo., stuffs with tiny pink plants.

She uses what’s called ‘Confetti Pink,’ a cultivar of the polka-dot plant (Hypoestes phyllostachya). She pokes them sparingly into damp sphagnum moss inside the form.

“When we start getting some real heat,” she says, “it will cover that whole body.”

Courtney is getting a kick out of the response to her animal plantings.

“I was telling somebody that if you got all of the different kinds of animal forms we have planted with grass seed in them, we would have a grass menagerie.” Ba-dum-bump!

“It seems like everybody wants something fantastical this year,” she says. “I think we’re always looking for something new. Our lives are so busy and hectic, and our yards have become our little oases away from all of that chaos in our lives.”

She adds that “since 9-11, people are starting to have friends come over more than ever, and they want relief, and they want something different that nobody else has. People want to be special and want their homes and their yards to be special, too.”

Topiary — the kind at Passiglia’s Nursery & Garden Center in Wildwood, Mo. — is fun and formal, all at one time.

The neat gravel courtyard in front of the garden center is dotted with enough spiraling, soaring living things to be a staging area for some Italian Renaissance garden.

“I wouldn’t say topiary is our main focus,” says Passiglia’s manager, Brian Rowe, “but it is something we do offer. And we are starting to see a little bit more interest.”

The arborvitae and juniper, Alberta spruce and Boulevard cypress all come in — trimmed and shaped — from other sources.

“They tend to give a more formal appearance,” says Rowe, “so to have it in front of an apartment or commercial building just gives it a cleaner, more prestigious appearance.

“And on the apartment end,” he adds, chuckling, “it means that they want to charge more for rent.”

In the home garden, Rowe adds, topiary “definitely gives more of a curb appeal.”

He describes less formal “woodland” gardens as “a little bit more time-consuming as far as the weeding and maintenance.

“With the formal and with topiaries, all you’re having to deal with is some trimming and watering,” he says. “But the formal garden is going to have gravel a lot of the time, whereas the woodland garden has mulches and wood particles.” Translation: mess.

Topiaries, Rowe says, “give the house a cleaner look.”

If you plan to buy or build a topiary this season, consider the following tips from area experts:

•To pack wire forms with sphagnum moss, wet the moss completely first and wear gloves as you handle it.

•To punch transplants of small-leafed ivy, euonymous or polka-dot plant, for instance, into moss, use a screwdriver to first make the planting hole.

•To affix growing, dangling shoots of these plants, pick up some old-fashioned hairpins and push them — plus shoots — into the moss.

•To care for topiaries outside, water frequently as you would anything planted in a container. Sphagnum moss tends to dry out quickly. For sculpted shrub topiaries, read the plant labels carefully and ask garden-center horticulturists for specific advice.

•To keep ivy topiaries indoors through the winter, find a cool east-facing window, stop fertilizing until February and water as needed until spring.

•To keep ivy on indoor topiaries free of spider mites, take them outside once or twice a year and wash the leaves with insecticidal soap.

•Read David Joyce’s “Topiary and the Art of Training Plants” (160 pages, Firefly, $24.95).