On the cutting hedge

ELFIN FOREST — The road to Charles and Jennifer Coburn's home meanders through the hills north and east of San Diego. Their property is a quick left off the main road and up a winding drive that ends in a field filled with animals. An older gent stands on a ladder to groom a handsome stallion. His clippers make a snap, snap, snapping sound as he trims bright green privet leaves along the stallion's spine. Giant steel bird skeletons flank the horse, waiting to be planted with gray-leaved olive trees and red-berried Pyracantha bushes.

The Coburns practice topiary, an art that goes back to ancient Roman gardeners who clipped and shaped shrubs into animal forms and geometric shapes. Today, most topiaries are tabletop-sized chicken wire forms filled with sphagnum moss and planted in ivy. But the owners of Coburn Topiary & Garden Art have taken the garden art in a different direction. They design huge, sculptural metal frames and plant them with full-sized trees and shrubs. Their pieces decorate estates, resorts, commercial properties and public spaces such as Disneyland and Legoland, and cities including Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and Nagoya, Japan.

In Westwind Park at Playa Vista, for example, stands a pair of giant topiary warblers. Paul Haden, president and founder of the Collaborative West landscape architecture firm of San Clemente, asked the Coburns to create topiary that would make the small, pocket park adjacent to Ballona Wetlands feel playful and fanciful. The result? "The Coburns' style and ability gave wings to our ideas," Haden says. "I have gotten untold calls from people telling us that the topiary birds put a smile on their faces."

Jennifer emerges from the giant, barn-like studio and greets her stepfather, on the ladder, as she leads a visitor inside. The space is filled with steel frames in various stages of construction. Some are larger-than-life animals -- 6-foot-tall dogs and cats for a pet supply store; two giant swans for a Beverly Hills residence; and enormous geometrics including two "pyramisques," combination pyramid-obelisks made for the streetscape along Rodeo Drive south of Wilshire Boulevard.

Jennifer Coburn has been making topiary since the 1980s. She started with ivy and sphagnum moss. Then, working with her sister who is a horticulturist, Jennifer started experimenting with woody trees and shrubs. It wasn't until Jennifer married Charles, however, that the horticulture component of her art fully bloomed.