Frills and flounces seam your garden

Secateurs are to plants what barber’s scissors are to the hair. Just like a haircut shapes and styles the hair apart from clipping the overgrowth, pruning can be done not only for the healthy growth of the tree, but also to chisel the foliage into desired shapes. Hedges are mostly sheared to bring about the look of the border, while not resorting to any experiment. However, the same trees when planted individually with definite intervals across the lawn or collectively to form a levelled pattern, can be pruned to represent different shapes, thus resulting in Topiaries. They not only present a visual treat, but also improve the overall appearance by breaking monotony. For this very reason, they can be tried out in colony parks and children’s play areas.

“Soft stemmed plants with thick growth of shrubbery should be preferred as topiaries. Those with woody stems can not tolerate regular or heavy pruning,” says M. M. Hussain of Plants Land Nursery.

The soft-stemmed ones include varieties such as Ficus, Duranta, Golden melaleuca, and Clerodendron inerme. These, apart from being soft in stems, tolerate regular pruning and throw out new branches easily—a quality desired for shaping and maintaining the topiaries. They should also be evergreen to sustain leaves throughout the year.
Hedgers

Hedge plants such as Murraya exotica, Thuja, and Casuarina equisitifolia can also be used for making topiaries. Big trees such as Putranjiva roxburghii, Polyalthia pendula, Polyalthia longifolia, and Acalypha while used as hedges, are not conducive to being trained as topiaries. Most popular ones are Ficus benjamina, Ficus reginald, Ficus prestige, Ficus nuda, Ficus panda, Ficus bushy king, Duranta speciosa variegata, Duranta plumeri, Duranta golden shower, and Duranta speciosa golden.

Training a topiary is much akin to grooming a bonsai in that similar techniques such as bending, shaping, and distancing the branches from each other are employed in both cases.

Topiaries can be small, medium-sized or large in size. They can be pruned to represent as many shapes as one’s imagination permits. The most common shapes are balls, cubes, obelisks and cones with multiple tiers in them.

At times, they can also be trained in spiralling shapes. Tiered topiaries can be made by allowing foliage to spread at different levels in single stem.

To begin with, a plant with abundant branching should be chosen and be allowed to grow thick foliage on all four sides. Then a desired shape should be carved by pruning out unwanted portions using secateurs.

However, the desired result can not be achieved with a single pruning. Regular shaping is required to get the topiary with the perfect finish. Mechanical saws are widely used instead of secateurs to shape the topiary.

Topiaries can also be worked into hedges by shaping them in a running length and forming pillars or balls in intervals. Most popular are the ones representing animal life and attracting children’s attention. Usually, such topiaries are wrought by using thin metal frames to clip away all protruding branches. The most preferred plant for animal shapes is Clerodendron inerme (Bombay Border), as these can take any amount of pruning.
‘Turning table’

For achieving perfect similarity among a group of topiaries, one may use the ‘turning table’ technique, whereby the plant may be placed on a turning table and rotated across a frame to cut off the protruding branches. Same process can be repeated for all the plants to create harmony.

Nowadays, a trend whereby a clump of soft-stemmed plants are grafted and trained to represent various mesh-like three-dimensional patterns is catching up. These are mostly imported from nations of Far East and the West.