It will be about five years before Roger Rabbit makes the scene.

Mary Poppins should be ready to take root in about three years.

It all depends on how much greenery they muster, and whether they have any bald spots.

Roger, Mary and about 50 other characters and animals are the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time topiary figures in Disneyland's landscaping area, out of the public view.

Budding figures in the back lot include Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, a full-grown Bambi, a skunk, a mountain lion and a tiger. They will pop up around the park in the next few years, as soon as a rich growth of leaves has covered any trace of their metal frames.

Topiary, the shaping of shrubs, trees and vines into ornamental figures, has been a part of Disneyland since the early '60s, when Walt Disney envisioned his characters as living, growing art objects.

"Walt had been to Europe and had seen some topiary," recalls Bill Evans, 79, a consulting landscaper who has been with Disney 35 years and has worked with Sunset magazine.

"There is still an ample supply of century-old topiary in Europe, some probably 200 years old. Walt said to me, 'Why don't we do something like this?'

"I told him, 'Walt, the stuff you see will probably take us 20 years.' "

Disney gave the OK, and Evans was able to present some simple topiary within two years. "It wasn't perfect, but it was presentable," he recalled.

To get results so quickly, he eschewed the age-old method of growing plants within metal frames and took full-grown plants, carefully bending them to fit the shapes.

"We started off with a crocodile and the hippos from 'Fantasia,' " Evans said. "We used a six-foot-long blueprint and used warped reinforcing steel to match the skeleton of the figure. Then we used wire to get the third dimension and fleshed it out with other plants.

"Sometimes we used two different plant materials. For the rhino, the horn is part of a plant that comes up the foreleg."

Today, topiary dots the park, with a leafy Dumbo holding court in Fantasyland and the largest collection of beasts situated in front of the It's a Small World ride. Most of the plants took seven to 10 years to mature, said Ken Inouye, landscape superintendent.

Some of the animals are crafted from eugenia, a shrub well-suited to Orange County's climate.