Technically, the “garden maiden” I created from reclaimed material isn’t a topiary, since she grows over an armature I built. She isn’t pruned into a specific form from the usual evergreen shrubs, such as cypress, juniper, and box honeysuckle. Instead, she’s studded with hundreds of clippings snipped from drought-tolerant succulents.
I used a metal tomato cage as the base. Turned upside down, the cage’s structure was the perfect form for a bell-shaped skirt. The cage’s pointed ends that are usually shoved into the ground extended upward and became the main part of her body from her waist to her shoulders. I then pieced together scraps of chicken wire and wrapped the wire around her upper body.
I wired two plastic orange juice containers (89 ounces each) onto the top ends of the tomato cage, faced upward so the curved handles could form her rounded shoulders. Luckily, I live in a town where people dump truck-loads of chipped bark in vacant lots. I filled her body cavity with this bark for added stability.
I free-formed the garden maiden’s head from scraps of wire. Its shape is long and blocky because I wanted an oddball base for her wild hair. At the local dollar store, I bought a foot-long oval tray and a hand mirror. I broke the mirror with a hammer and glued pieces of it to the tray to make her face. Her eyes are two pieces of green sea glass.
To cover the structure, I), fire stick (), blue chalksticks (), donkey’s tail (), and more. I also added clippings from succulents I glimpsed on roadsides and in vacant lots.
