Topiary Tortoise

This is a record of how I made my topiary tortoise.  You can, of course, make a proper topiary animal, using plants such as small-leaved ivy or a shrub like Box (Buxus sempervirens) that grows from a pot and then up through a shaped frame and is then pruned into the desired shape.  I collect various succulents, and I got the idea of using them planted in a frame after seeing a couple that were for sale on the Internet – but they were expensive, and it seemed like more fun to make one myself.  I decided to do it with little expense, and mostly with materials that I found around the house, garden or in the shed, so what follows is probably not the best model, but just some guidelines on how it might be done.

Step 1  I started with a piece of chicken wire (but with small square holes instead of the usual octagonal ones) about three foot square, that I found in my shed.  If you have more to work with you could do a better job.  I also had a spool of wire and a pair of wire cutters.

Step 2  I cut a piece of the chicken wire to form the body, and put an old plastic plant support in the bottom (I later added a plant pot tray), to give it some stability.

Step 3  I closed off the back end of the body shape to be the tail endof the tortoise, and left the other end (right hand side in photo) a bit more open so that I could attach the head and neck pieces into it.  Then I started to form four tubes to make the legs.

Step 4  At the bottom of each leg I splayed out the wire to form the feet.

Steps 5 and 6  Then I attached the legs to the body, making some of the tube of leg go up into the cavity of the body (to give it more strength).  See the following two photos.

Step 7  I made a shape for the neck and head and attached that.

Step 8  I then added a large plastic dish on top of the circular plant support, as I thought that might hold a little water that could be absorbed by the moss later on.  In order to strengthen the legs so that they would support the eventual weight of the tortoise, I cut some sticks and put them in the middle of the leg shapes and rested them on milk bottle caps that I put in the bottom of the feet, so that the sticks couldn’t fall out.  I put a stick into the neck and head shape too, to strengthen it.   I raked up a lot up of moss from the lawn and began to stuff the whole shape with it, and also bought a bag of sphagnum moss at a garden centre to supplement the lawn moss.  I tried to stuff it in quite tightly so that the roots of the plants would grow down into it, without too many gaps and air spaces.

Step 9  Here is the whole tortoise stuffed with sphagnum moss (the real tortoise on the back is just there to give it some sense of scale).  As you can see, a lot of the moss is coming through the holes in the chicken wire, so I tried to push most of it inside (although I didn’t want the wire to show either, so I left some bits on the surface).  I also made a little tail for the rear end of the tortoise.

Step 10  Then I started planting Sempervivums in the wire holes, leaving spaces between them so that they could grow and produce babies.  Sempervivums are commonly known as Houseleeks or Hens and Chicks, and you often see them in rock gardens.  They grow easily in cracks in rocks, are fully hardy (so you can leave them out all winter), and come in various shades of red and green.  Here’s a link to photos of some on our web site.  You can buy Sempervivums at any garden centre, and you could also use various types of Sedum and Crassula, as long as they are a low growing variety.  You can break off each rosette from a clump and plant it separately, and it will soon sprout roots (if it doesn’t have some already), grow larger, and produce ‘babies’.  With rosettes that do not yet have roots, or only small roots, you might want to cut little pieces of wire into a ‘U’ shape and pushed them over and down around each rosette to peg it down in the frame until it has rooted.  This will stop the rosettes from falling out, or being pecked out by birds.

Step 11  The image below shows some of the rosettes after planting, and also the tail.  For the tail I laid a piece of Sedum Reflexum along it and pegged it down.  This is something that people may have in their gardens anyway, so you ought to be able to find some if you like it, or you could just plant a few rosettes of sempervivum along the length of the tail.

Step 12  This is a shot of the topiary tortoise looking down from above.

Step 13  This is an image taken about a month or two after the tortoise was finished, and you can already see lots of ‘baby’ rosettes coming off some of the big ones (hence the common name of ‘Hens and Chicks’).  I ran out of rosettes to plant on the neck, and parts of the legs, so I’ll add some more this year.

Step 14  There must have been some grass mixed in with the moss that I raked up from the lawn.  The image below shows the rosettes with all the babies coming off them, and also the grass that started to grow in and is now so thick that it is actually covering some of the rosettes and I have to keep cutting it with a scissors, which is a nuisance. 
 
Although the grass does give it a natural look, you might want to avoid having grass in with the rosettes, and so just buy sphagnum moss and let the Sempervivum rosettes spread to fill up the gaps.  You might also want to be more careful and meticulous than I was when planting the rosettes -- I started out alternating red plants with green ones, but soon got bored and just planted them anywhere.  And I think that with careful planting you could easily achieve a pattern of plants that more closely resembles the scutes of a tortoise.

One other word of warning.  Sempervivums do sometimes have flowers that are produced at the top of a long thick stem that arises from the middle of the rosette.  Here is a photo of one, and you can see that it does somewhat ruin the idea of scutes (or at least makes it looks as if the tortoise has ‘pyramiding'!), but they are such pretty flowers that I allowed them to stay.

As you can see, I just improvised most of the work, and it didn’t take long (I think a day or two at a leisurely pace) to make.  I’m sure with some more thought and creativity you could make a much better one than I did, and if you do decide to have a go, please let us know and post your photos on our TTT forum!