Animal Attraction

A giraffe peers out over a garden filled with his friends--a Scottish terrier, a camel, a bear, a rooster and a host of other species--all larger than life and all poised in a moment of action. Here there is no conflict. These critters are topiaries and no ordinary ones at that.

While many green sculptures elsewhere are done the fast way--metal frames stuffed with sphagnum moss and covered with fast-growing plants such as ivy--these works of garden art are fashioned from ordinary shrubs that are rooted in the ground. Each has taken a minimum of 10 years to mature to their present size, and most of them have been around for a long time.

These sculptures live at Green Animals, a topiary garden on the grounds of a late-19th-century estate in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. The topiary garden--the largest privately owned topiary garden in the country--was begun in 1912 and has been going strong ever since.

Some of the works date back to the beginning of the garden; the shrubs for the giraffe, camel and the elephant were planted then. Many of the sculptures stands on a "table"--a group of plants that have been pruned into a platform out of which the animal is allowed to emerge.

Most of the animals are fashioned from California privet. "It's fast-growing, malleable and forgiving," says grounds manager Crisse MacFadyen Genga. "And because it's fast-growing, it needs constant trimming." The privet is deciduous, which--on this plant in this climate-- means that it turns brown in winter, loses some of its leaves, then drops the rest when the new growth comes on in the spring.

The geometric shapes in the garden are boxwood, which is evergreen and doesn't take detail well. A few of the animals--the teddy bear and rooter, for example--are yew, a sturdy needled evergreen that requires pruning only once or twice a year.

Pruning is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. "We use hand trimmers because you guarantee that you're going to be safer, plus you get the detail and it's healthier for the plant. These topiaries have been around a long time, and we owe them the respect to not brutalize them with heavy machinery."

There have been losses. A blight wiped out a peach orchard, so crabapples--a species also historically appropriate--became the replacements. A visitor snapped off the elephant's trunk when he climbed inside the sculpture to try to get a better photographic viewpoint.

But the biggest threats come from the elements. "Various tails and bills have frozen off," Genga says. "The weather makes me the most nervous--high wind, heavy snow, freezes, and cold weather--basically things that are out of my control."

Still, most of the sculptures have been around for scores of years. Every morning Genga comes in with a checklist of what needs to be done in the garden, and most days everything on the list gets checked off.

The giraffe, camel, Scottie and the other critters can attest to that.