Bringing out the beast

Lori Ann David unleashes her talent as a topiary artist

10/25/03

NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER

Lori Ann David has trained elephants, bears, even tigers, and never once has she been harmed.

Well, maybe just a scratch.

She is, after all, a topiary artist.

The Santa Barbara resident's creatures have been roaming the area for more than 10 years. They can be spotted all around town -- from the large horse by the main entrance at Hayward's Patio and Awning Center on State Street to the hippocampus at Lotusland on Ashley Road.

Ms. David, who said that fall is an ideal season to install such creations because the ensuing rains will help establish their root systems, helped restore the Lotusland topiary garden that officially opened three years ago.

"It was a mess," she said, sitting cross-legged on a brick walkway near a labyrinth there. "They (the topiaries) were sort of blobs with the possibility that it was a shape or something at one time."

Ganna Walska, the famed Polish opera singer who bought the 37-acre estate in 1941, got them from a man in Los Angeles. Sifting through her belongings, including old photographs, Ms. David was able to identify what they looked like in the 1960s.

"Anything she had an interest in or passion about, she kept a scrapbook on it -- whether it was vitamins, shoes or topiaries," said Ms. David. "We actually found her old scrapbook on topiary gardens."

Based on the information, Ms. David added creatures inspired by those originally in the garden -- for example, a dancing pig -- and a few that were not -- such as a flamboyant peacock.

"Ganna Walska was a figure larger than life. She had six husbands. She had been an opera singer. She had (Russian designer) Erte costumes," said Ms. David. "The male peacock is the most showy bird. I thought, 'We have to create a figure that honored her spirit.' I couldn't think of anything better."

But that's not necessarily true of the garden itself.

"I would have gone one step further than Ganna Walska did. I would have loved to make all of these move," said Ms. David, referring to the 37 figures. Maybe have the parrot's wings flap or the horse whinny as visitors pass by it. "I look at this as art. Art has no limits."

Particularly when it's hers. She has designed dolphins out of juniper that appear to jump out of a pond and rabbits out of rosemary that appear to snack on a garden.

"I love rabbits in my garden!" said Ms. David, adding that it's the most popular animal topiary. "Most people go: 'You're crazy! They eat your vegetables!' I'm like, 'No, this is a rosemary rabbit.' "

Besides, if it ever gets out of hand, all she has to do is cook it up.

Jill Kent no longer minds the deer in her Riviera garden. With a steel body, about the only damage it's capable of is rusting. And, really, not even that because it has a protective powder coating.

"It looks like it's just come up from the canyon," said Ms. Kent, who had real antlers put on it. So far, none of the other deer -- the kind that actually leave behind their footprints -- has nipped at it. "The plant that is in the deer is not one they eat."

Ms. Kent, a real estate agent, also took in a kitten that bats a ball of succulents.

"There were a lot of cats in the canyon that were feral when I moved here. I had them trapped and fixed, so now I take care of all of them, or they take care of me, I don't know which," she said with a chuckle. "I just thought they'd like to have another playmate."

Ms. David, who also designs architectural shapes and offers other services through her business, Landscape ArtDesign (it's no coincidence that the name contains her initials), has a client in Montecito, married to a veterinarian, who always wanted dogs but, for whatever reason, didn't have any. She finally adopted a couple from Ms. David.

"She keeps balls out there, so when you look at her back yard, it looks like there's dogs out there running around," said Ms. David.

Another client, from Santa Barbara, raises tropical fish. He was lured by the idea of taking care of even more.

"He wanted this sort of piranha-ish scene in his front yard," recalled Ms. David.

He netted big time. Now there are several big fish chasing another one that's leaping toward a gigantic copper hook.

"I thought that was pretty weird, although I would never use the word 'weird' with topiary. I think it's insightful. I think it's interesting. I think it's out-of-the-box," said Ms. David. "It just makes people think differently about the possibilities with plants."

She started doing that as a youngster after her grandmother took her to Ladew Topiary Gardens in Maryland and saw a famous hunt scene of dogs jumping over a hedge.

"Instead of having just trees and shrubs and flowers, here was an active, dynamic scene that, when you came around the corner, made you think about the possibility of it being real," she said. "That's what fascinates me about topiary. It takes the expected and turns it into the unexpected."

Who knew, for example, that a brontosaurus could hatch out of a ligustrum shrub and cohabit beautifully with Santa Barbara's beautiful -- without posing any real threat except, say, to their pocketbook? One of Ms. David's larger designs could fetch several hundred dollars -- if not more.

"I wish that somebody would just give me carte blanche," said Ms. David, whose motivation genuinely seems to be a love of making things rather than money. She would design a scene after the one at Old Deaf School Park in Columbus, Ohio. "The whole park is a re-creation of this famous French painting called 'A Sunday On La Grande Jatte' by Georges Seurat. You have Victorian people strolling along, you have people fishing in boats."

Ms. David says there's nothing she can't do -- and you believe her.

She actually taught herself how to make topiaries while helping raise organic strawberries and garlic in the San Juan Islands during the late 1970s.

"We were a bunch of hippies on a farm," she joked. "It was a very self-sufficient, amazing life. It was on a small island, so we all had to pool our resources and teach each other what we knew."

As it turned out, someone there knew how to weld. And soon, she did too. The training allowed her to make the steel frames that she often fills with, among other things, Eugenia (Monterey Bay) or Podocarpus (Australian fern pine) and secures to the ground to make a topiary.

"I'm a Renaissance woman, absolutely. I finally admitted that only because that's what everyone has called me all my life," said Ms. David, who once considered the term too boastful. "I have a different sense of time, space, relationship. I don't do traditional things. I never have."

That's exactly what makes her the kind of person you can chat with for hours at, say, Lotusland, and never realize the hands moving on the horticultural clock. She was a shoemaker, has earned a pilot's license that recently allowed her to fly to Panama, and belongs to a belly-dancing group that performs occasionally at private parties.

"I've been working on this outrageous belly-dancing costume for years," she said, describing an elaborate headpiece and top. "Pearls just drip off of it."

The mother of two is also playing with a larger-than-life chess set in her welding shop. She intends to put it in her yard.

"My son, who is 10 1/2, is a master chess player," said Ms. David.

She admitted he tends to beat her.

"I am the mother," she said with a twinkle in her eye. "That's kind of required."

F.Y.I.

Lori Ann David can be reached through her business, Landscape ArtDesign, at 569-5009, or go to www.landscapeartdesign.com on the Web.

LEN WOOD / NEWS-PRESS PHOTOS

Lori Ann David reached new heights in her career when she was asked to help restore the topiary garden at Lotusland. A menagerie of her other designs there includes, at top from left, a bird, swirls, a hippocampus, a dancing pig and a peacock. "They're my babies," she says of her topiary work.