Topiary Garden
Test your imagination with these beautifully off-kilter plant forms.
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In every season, living evergreen and deciduous plant sculptures transport you to another world where anything goes—as long as it’s unexpected.
This garden was designed in 2002 by architect and landscape designer David Swetland. And since it primarily consists of young trees and shrubs, it grows more abstract by the year.
Every detail of form, texture, and color was carefully selected to give the garden its quirky atmosphere. There are no straight edges here. Instead, you’ll see abundant circles and sinuous lines intersecting with conical, rounded and pendulous shapes that delightfully surprise and playfully confound.
Notice the “candle forests” of spruces, arborvitaes and falsecypress. Eccentric-looking seasonal plantings round out this otherworldly beauty.
Things to Discover
Topiary Tunnel | Many topiary gardens have carved their plants into fanciful vegetable animals, birds, and garden gnomes. Ours mainly depicts abstract shapes: sinuous curving forms, angular masses … and this spruce-y tunnel. We do have one special creature—it’s a giant peacock spreading its tail of |
more
Many topiary gardens have carved their plants into fanciful vegetable animals, birds, and garden gnomes. Ours mainly depicts abstract shapes: sinuous curving forms, angular masses … and this spruce-y tunnel. We do have one special creature—it’s a giant peacock spreading its tail of golden Yew leaves. Have you ever heard a peacock? Loud!
Coleus ‘Inferno’ (Coleus scutellarioides) | When grown in full sun with enough water, and pinched a few times along the way, modern Coleus cultivars just grow bigger and bolder … until the first frost. We have several varieties at the Garden ranging from rainbow multi-hued to nearly black.
Morning Sentinels | We’ve seen these fastigiate spruces before, but in winter, their tall, lean statures expose their evolved intent: to shed and withstand the branch-snapping insults of heavy, wet snows. The topiary garden is charming all seasons.
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