Topiary

A boxwood  llama perpetually grazed one spot on a former hay field, now populated with a plethora of other leafy-coifed biota ... a cypress elephant, a rosemary pig, a cedar lion, a blue-spruce giraffe, a hemlock hippopotamus, and a juniper horse ... all seemingly like the hemp-induced chimeras of a gene-splice between Salvador Dali and Edward Sissorhands. But they weren’t. These topiaries had been carefully nurtured and tonsured by Amos Roosevelt, a overly-shy car mechanic, who was brideless, parentless, and childless ... and, therefore, able to spend all of his spare time and most of his salary on these organic origami.

Throughout the spring, summer, and fall; Amos was up at six A.M. pruning, plucking, and fussing over his children, as he called them, before he donned his impeccably clean overalls and went off to the mechanic's garage. Again, in the evening, Amos would lovingly tend his progeny until encroaching darkness would force him into his modest home where he ate his frugal meal, and, after sketching a few new ideas, would retire to his lumpy bed. This bush-artist was the grand master of his craft. He even went so far as to cause fern eyelashes to sprout on the giraffe’s doe-eyes; monster cactus teeth to root in the gaping mouth of the hippo, and gigantic ears to grow on the elephant’s head out of ... what else? ... elephant-ear plants.

Amos was an extremely private person. He was not an old man, probably no more than thirty-five, but he seemed as celibate as the Pope. This was as much due to his compulsions as it was to any testosterone deficiency. But, at the furthest-reaches of this acreage, in the center of a tall privet maze ... far from the prying eyes of the occasional tourist ... was a topiary that no one else had ever seen. It was an evergreen Aphrodite ... hedge-manicured to the finest detail by Amos. She had an aquiline nose, pouting lips, and cascading tresses that reached halfway down her sculpted back. She was standing on tiptoe and the resulting muscular tension reached all the way up her thin legs to her well-trimmed mons Venus. Her taut stomach arched up to two perky breasts crafted to perfection, even down to the aureoles around the nipples. Nothing was left to the imagination.

This was Amos’ one and only diversion. On most sunny Saturday afternoons he would casually wander to the back of his field, enter and traverse the hedge maze, and then, gazing longingly at his creation, he would disrobe, grab his pruning shears, climb his tripod orchard ladder, and hoarsely whisper to his shrubbery fetish, “I love yew.”

© Copyright, George W. Potts