Hello. My name is Thomas Lowe and I'm a landscape designer in Atlanta, Georgia. Today, I will be giving you tips on decorating outdoor topiary trees. This is a jasmine vine and you can sculpt this into shapes, different shapes, spirals, circles, all different types of shapes. What I'm going to do here is fist of all you would need to plant this in the ground, not too far out. You can plant it out but it's best if you plant it about 4 inches from the post. Sometimes there's a concrete foundation and you don't want to disturb that but you want it about 3 to 4 inches away from this post. And as in planting always, you want to plant all your plants, trees and shrubs even with the ground. So if you, once you plant this jasmine, close to this post, what you can do is go back with some small nails, because what we're going to do here is a spiral. So you plant this even with the ground about 4 inches away from the post and what you would do is you would take small, very small nails and you would nail one nail approximately about right here where my finger is and the other nail on this side, another on this side and another nail on this side, as in the shape that you're wanting to do. In this case, a spiral. So once this jasmine is in the ground and you have your small nails in a spiral section or pattern, then you take a lot of these vines for the shape of a line, you're just using line to form a shape. Then you can use pruning tie wire to bunch two or three. Or you can use as many as this vine has growing to start the form. Now usually when I'm starting out I always go in with all of the vines that this plant has right now. Because what I'll do is make a bigger base for the spiral. And then as the spiral starts to grow throughout the season, then you can start taking two vines or individual ones and then just tying on to the nails that you put here. Now once you have the spiral already formed, fertilize at least once or twice during the summer months. And just take your hand sheers and then you can just shape them to go in the spiral that you would like. Another way to decorate outdoor topiaries is these tall vertical outdoor plants. Out west you have a lot of Italian cypresses. Here in the east these are Sky Pencil hollies, most any upright plants, you can arch. And you also can put these in more shapes than just arches. I really recommend this aluminum pruning wire. We've used this before on several of our other videos. The pruning wire, I've already started this Sky Pencil holly and I'll go ahead and do a demo on this Sky Pencil. And make sure too if you want to do a topiary arch that when you plant these, that before you plant them that you go ahead and measure and make that the tops will be touching, the tips will be touching so that it does form an arch, that you don't plant them too far away. You can plant them further away but it's going to take longer for them to grow and then later you from an arch. But in this manner we planted these the appropriate spacing so that you could do a topiary arch. So, I'll go ahead, I started this one and I'll go ahead and do a demo here. Just take the aluminum pruning wire, that comes in a little row and there's different styles. So what you'd do is just start most anywhere here at the base. You don't have to tie it real tight, you can do it loose. The looser you do it here the bulkier in the course that you can really change the shape by tightening. So one we'll do a little loose. Also try to grab as many of these loose limbs. And go in a spiral, sort of up and spiral, and these unravel as you go up. A lot of time you can unravel a little extra, it makes it a little bit quicker. And you just go around all the way up. Then when you get to the top, unravel several more feet. And we want to get a lot of extra up here. Now, just go ahead, make sure that the two are overlapping. You can do it, do it more loose, more tight. If you do it too loose sometimes it can go forwards or backwards. So if you make it a little bit tighter it's stronger. So then you take the extra and you take the aluminum pruning wire, and this pruning wire is excellent to work with in many different topiaries or sculpting trees and shrubs and even small ornamental potted plants. So just once you get to wherever the end is it's just, just cut it with your handy hand pruners. Then usually you'll find one of the wires here, you just take this and just tie it on. And then you've got a nice little tree arch. Not in this case, but sometimes you'll have some other branches that are sticking out and you can always go back and use your tie wire just to tie those up to the other branches. And also once you have this arch here, you can take small ornaments, little small bird feeders, any type of garden ornament and just hang from here. And that will help sort of hold the arch in as well. Nothing very heavy. Sometimes you'll have some of these pieces. And there you have a nice tree arch. Some of them are big enough that you can walk through. Can you do this? Yes you can and I can help. Please go to eHow.com. Thank you.
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