BOOK REVIEWS

Quick and
Easy Topiary
and Green
Sculpture

Jenny Hendy
Penguin
$NZ55

TO the novice, topiary seems pretty scary stuff - far easier to deliver a shocking short-back-and-sides to your precious shrub rather than an immaculate coiffure. But here some of the mystique is unravelled. This paperback version of a four-year-old hardback promises some projects that can be accomplished in under an hour.

Quick and Easy Topiary kicks off with a guide to making topiary frames and, before you can say "ivy", it has you training plants over them.

Chapters on traditional topiary and how to adapt this to modern gardens follow. The book gives step-by-step tips on topiary care and a directory of shapes - birds, Christmas trees and teddy bears among them - to try your hand at.

Quick-growing alternatives to the traditional box and yew are given - a 32-page listing outlines more than 60 suitable topiary plants to use, their characteristics, cultivation and pointers on training them. There's plenty of detail backed by clear illustrations in this largish-format, "how-to" book.

If you've ever wanted to try your hand at the art and the price is no deterrent, Quick and Easy Topiary is a useful primer.

Weekend Gardener, Issue 142, 2004, Page 28
(reproduced in Horticulture in New Zealand:
Journal of the Royal NZ Institute of Horticulture 2005, 8(1): 20-21)

Reproduced with permission from the former Weekend Gardener magazine. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the RNZIH