Sculpting Trees, and Teaching Patience and Focus

Observer

3 days ago

Topiary, the practice of training plants into defined shapes, might evoke fantastical scenes from 'Alice in Wonderland' or the formal gardens of Versailles. Michael P. Gibson believes its lessons extend well beyond the aesthetic.
'Topiary forces you to learn how to be patient, because once you're trimming, you have to wait for that new growth to happen,' he explained from the top of a ladder propped against a 20-foot holly tree. 'I teach people that doing topiary can reduce anxiety. It helps you to stay focused.'
In other words, it's healthy for the plant and the human.
To that end, Gibson focuses on educating and serving communities (he holds a certificate in therapeutic horticulture). In Columbia, South Carolina, a capital city of about 140,000, he's creating a sensory garden at a neighborhood park. He also spends time traveling to take on new installations and maintain existent sculptures.
The prospective clients who approach him — whether they found him through his online presence, word of mouth or his 2021 appearance on the HGTV competition show 'Clipped' — tend to give him creative freedom, since they're aware of his distinctive style.
It's built on what he calls 'the Gibson method,' which has five approaches: storytelling; sacred geometry, which brings balance and harmony to his sculptures; the Japanese style of pruning called niwaki, opening up a tree to reduce energy and create structure; illusion; and directional trimming. (Like brushing hair, trimming in one direction allows for a smoother look.) All five need to be present for the design to be a Gibson creation.
Gibson, 38, started developing his signature method early in his life, though he didn't know it at the time. His mother is a licensed beautician who taught him to cut hair, and his father is a Navy veteran and artist who showed him the fundamentals of art — geometric shapes, proportional faces, 3D images.
He started working in the yard early, emulating his father, who took a pair of shears away from him when he was 6 and told him he was too young to handle them. By the next summer, he had practiced enough to prune the hedges himself.
When he moved out around 19, Gibson brought those shears with him. He cut grass and hair to make money, often drawing designs on paper beforehand: 'It got me thinking — what if I sketched out a design and put it in the shrubs? Because the shrubs are just like hair.'
Topiary became his side hustle as he worked a variety of sales jobs. Eventually, he found people who saw his vision. Their neighbors would catch on and, soon, the whole block did, too. By 2021, that had transformed into a career.
That year, he moved down to South Carolina to become the artist in residence at the award-winning Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden in Bishopville, about an hour from Columbia. 'I'd never seen a Black man doing topiary, especially at this scale,' Gibson said, referring to Fryar, now 85. 'He's the GOAT of topiary.'
Seeing Fryar work on his whimsical designs helped unlock his own creativity. When Fryar's health declined and he was no longer able to maintain the garden, Gibson lent a hand to help restore it.
Gibson thinks that people need plants in their lives, even if they don't become topiary artists. 'It's a stress reliever,' he said. 'It gives you a sense of accomplishment.'
After a plant is trimmed, new growth needs time to fill in: The more you shear, the more dense it becomes. A design can take years before coming into true focus.
Depending on the plant variety and the growing zone, a single tree can take five to 10 hours to complete; a larger project for a client might take 20 to 30 hours initially and then need to be maintained two or three times a year in colder climates. At home in South Carolina, he retrims his topiaries every six to eight weeks.
'I don't try to force it to be anything it doesn't want to be,' he added. 'I want to do something that's so natural, but complex, so you look at it and think: Wait, does it grow like that? Is it supposed to look like that?'
At Edisto Discovery Park in Columbia, Gibson is in the first phase of building out a therapeutic sensory garden, supported by funding from the IDEA Center for Public Gardens and the U.S. Botanic Garden's Sowing Excellence program. He's redoing the landscaping and just starting to plant, but the vision is already there, rooted in creating a space that feels inviting to the neighborhood.
Gibson wants to make a place both children and adults keep returning to, and he hopes to leave them with information about horticulture they can apply to their lives. 'When we're throwing away dead wood and branches we don't need anymore, think of those as bad habits, right?' he said. 'You need to cut off the bad habits so they don't affect your design later down the road. That's a life lesson.' —NYT
Topiary artist Michael Gibson in Edisto Discovery Park, where he is in the first phase of building out a therapeutic sensory garden, in Columbia, S.C., April 14, 2025. (Elizabeth Bick/The New York Times)