Iasi. Topiary forms that are to be purchased or obtained in the garden will be chosen based on the target group particularities; they could be fi xed or mobile, as needed. Bibliography 1. Amery C., B. Curran. The lost world of Pompeii. J. Paul Getty Museum, New York, 2002. pp.: 138. 2. Constantinescu S. Viorica. Arta Grădinii. Edit. Meridiane, Buc., 1992. pp: 49-67. 3. Diarmuid Gavin. Design your garden. DK Publsh., New York, 2004. pp.: 1-175. 4. Gallup Barbara, Reich Deborah. The complete book of topiary. Workman Publsh., New York, 1987. pp.: 23-26. 5. Gilgemeister Heidi. Mediterranean gardening. Edit. Moll. Palma de Mallorca, 1996. pp.: 82-83. TOPIARY – THE MOST MAGNIFICENT HORTICULTURAL ART THROUGH THE YEARS Roşca I.*, Ciorchina Nina*, Dumitraş Adelina**, Clapa Doina*** * Botanical Garden (Institute) Academy of Sciences of Moldova, 18 Pădurii str. Chisinau MD 2002, ** University of Agricultural Science and Veterinary Medicine, 3-5 Mănăştur, 400372 Cluj-Napoca, RO, *** Fruit Research Station Cluj, 5 Horticultorilor str. 400457, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Summary. The wonders fanciful topiary - renderings of animals, humans, and objects created from evergreens, perennial herbs, and other natural plant material- never fails to leave a lasting impression on all who experience it. This art form has been practiced for centuries, resulting in elegant green constructions of seemingly endless size, shape, and subject matter. Yet with continuing interest in gardening and crafts, this elegant form of self-expression is enjoying a fresh vogue among celebrities and other prominent people worldwide. Topiaries is a unique survey of the splendid parterres, arches, pyramids, spheres, columns, knot gardens, and other formations that constitute this magnifi cent and enduring art. Topiary is the horticultural practice of training live perennial plants, by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees, shrubs and sub shrubs for developing and maintaining clearly defi ned shapes [1], perhaps geometric or fanciful, plants which have been shaped in this way. It can be an art and is a form of living sculpture. The word derives from the Latin word for an ornamental landscape gardener, topiarius, and creator of topia or places. A Greek word that Romans applied also to fi ctive indoor landscapes executed 451 in fresco. No doubt the use of a Greek word betokens the art’s origins in the Hellenistic world that was infl uenced by Persia, for neither Classical Greece nor Republican Rome developed any sophisticated tradition of artful pleasure grounds. The plants used in topiary are evergreen, mostly woody, have small leaves or needles, produce dense foliage, and have compact and/or columnar (e. g. fastigiate) growth habits. Common species choices used in topiary include cultivars of European box (Buxus sempervirens), arborvitae (Thuja spp.), bay laurel (Laurus nobilis), holly (Ilex spp.), myrtle (Eugenia or Myrtus species), yew (Taxus species), and privet (Ligustrum species) [2]. Shaped wire cages are sometimes employed in modern topiary to guide untutored shears, but traditional topiary depends on patience and a steady hand, small-leaved ivy can be used to cover a cage and give the look of topiary in a few months. The hedge is a simple form of topiary used to create boundaries, walls or screens. History and origin European topiary dates from Roman times. Pliny’s Natural History and the epigram - writer Martial both credit Cneius Matius Calvena, in the circle of Julius Caesar, with introducing the fi rst topiary to Roman gardens, and Pliny the Younger describes in a letter the elaborate fi gures of animals, inscriptions and ciphers and obelisks in clipped greens at his Tuscan villa (Epistle VI, to Apollinaris). Within the atrium of a Roman house or villa, a place that had formerly been quite plain, the art of the topiaries produced a miniature landscape (topos) which might use the comparable art of stunting trees, also mentioned, disapprovingly, by Pliny (Historia Naturalis, XII.6). Far eastern topiary Clipping and shaping of shrubs and trees in China and Japan has been practiced with equal rigor, but to entirely different aesthetic aims: the artful expression of the natural forms of venerably aged pines, given character by the forces of wind and weather. Their most concentrated expressions are in the related arts of Chinese penjing and Japanese bonsai. Japanese cloud-pruning, i.e. illustration, is closest to the European art: the cloud- like forms of clipped growth are designed to be best appreciated after a fall of snow. Japanese Zen gardens (karesansui, dry rock gardens) make extensive use of so-called Karikomi it means, topiary technique of clipping shrubs and trees into large curved shapes or sculptures, and Hako-zukuri, understanding as shrubs clipped into boxes and straight lines. 452 Renaissance topiary From its European revival in the 16th century, topiary has historically been associated with both the parterres and terraces in gardens of the European elite and equally as features in cottage gardens. Traditional topiary forms use foliage pruned and/or trained into geometric shapes: balls or cubes, obelisks, pyramids, cones, tapering spirals, and the like. Representational forms depicting people, animals, and manmade objects have also been popular. Topiary at Versailles and its imitators was never complicated: low hedges punctuated by potted trees trimmed as balls on standards, interrupted by obelisks at corners provided the vertical features of fl at-patterned parterre gardens. Sculptural forms were provided by stone and lead sculptures. In Holland, however, the fashion was established for more complicated topiary designs; this Franco-Dutch garden style spread to England after 1660. Decline in the 18th century In England topiary was all but killed in fashion by the famous satiric essay on ”Verdant Sculpture” that Alexander Pope published in The Guardian, 29 September 1713, with its mock catalogue descriptions of: • Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the tree of knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the serpent very fl ourishing. • The tower of Babel, not yet fi nished. • St George in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in condition to stick the dragon by next April. • A quickset hog, shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week in rainy weather. In the 1720s and 1730s, the generation of Charles Bridgeman and William Kent swept the English garden clean of its hedges, mazes, and topiary. After topiary fell from grace in aristocratic gardens, however, it continued to be featured in cottagers gardens, where a single specimen of traditional forms, a ball, a tree trimmed to a cone in several cleanly separated tiers, meticulously clipped and perhaps topped with a topiary peacock, was passed on as an heirloom. Revival The revival of topiary in English gardening parallels the revived Jacobethan taste in architecture; John Loudon in the 1840s was the fi rst garden writer to express a sense of loss at the topiary that had been 453 removed from English gardens. The art of topiary, with enclosed garden rooms burst upon the English gardening public with the matured example of Elvaston Castle, Derbyshire, which opened to public viewing in the 1850s and created a sensation: within a few years architectural topiary was springing up all over the country (it took another 25 years before sculptural topiary began to become popular as well) [3]. The following generation, represented by James Shirley Hibberd, rediscovered the charm of specimens as part of the mystique of the English cottage garden, which was as much invented as revived from the 1870s: It may be true, as I believe it is, that the natural form of a tree is the most beautiful possible for that tree, but it may happen that we do not want the most beautiful form, but one of our own designing, and expressive of our ingenuity (James Shirley Hibberd). The classic statement of the British Arts and Crafts revival of topiary among roses and mixed herbaceous borders, characterized generally as the old-fashioned garden or the Dutch garden [4] was Topiary: Garden Craftsmanship in Yew and Box by Nathaniel Lloyd (1867-1933), who had retired in middle age and taken up architectural design under the encouragement of Sir Edwin Lutyens: Lloyd’s own timber-framed manor house, Great Dixter, Sussex, remains an epitome of this stylized mix of topiary with “cottagey” plantings that was practiced by Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens in a fruitful partnership. The new gardening vocabulary incorporating topiary required little expensive restructuring in plan: “At Lyme Park, Cheshire, the garden went from being an Italian garden to being a Dutch garden without any change actually taking place on the ground”, Brent Elliot noted in 2000 [4]. Americans in England were awake to the renewed charms of topiary. When William Waldorf Astor bought Hever Castle, Kent ca 1906, the moat surrounding the house precluded adding wings for servants, guests and the servants of guests that the Astor manner required: he built an authentically- style Tudor village to accommodate the overfl ow, with an “Old English Garden” including buttressed hedges and free-standing topiary [4]. In the preceding decade, expatriate Americans, led by Edwin Austin Abbey, created an Anglo-American society at Broadway, Worcestershire, where topiary was one of the elements of a “Cotswold” house-and-garden style soon naturalized among upper-class Americans at home. Topiary, which had featured in very few eighteenth-century American gardens, came into favor with the Colonial Revival gardens and the grand manner of the American Renaissance, 1880–1920. The beginning of a concern with the revival and maintenance of historic gardens in the 20th century led 454 to the replanting of the topiary maze at the Governor’s Palace, Colonial Williamsburg, in the 1930s. 20th century American Portable style Topiary was introduced to Disneyland around 1962.