News

The art of Topiary

By WANDEKA GAYLE, Staff Reporter

HE STARTED OUT as a simple gardener, pruning trees and tilling earth, but 72-year-old Frank Wilson of Church Avenue, Kingston 8 claims he always had the skill of a true artist simmering just below the surface.

As a youth at Alpha Boys School, Wilson was captivated by the film Edward Scissorshands, a story of a life-like robot with a heart who had scissors for hands that could craft any shape from ice, tree and fur.

Wilson told THE STAR that the movie inspired him to become a 'scissorshands' himself, pruning trees into various shapes in the art we call topiary.

"When I saw it I said to myself, I can do that," he recounted with a smile creasing his face, "I discovered that I was gifted as an artist and so I began looking in books."

While a student at Maxfield Park High at age 16, he would give his colleagues a clean trim whenever he could.

However, tragedy struck and his mother passed on before he left school. He was thrust out into the world but did not succumb to the pressures. He instead became a gardener, working at Plantation Inn Hotel in Ocho Rios, St. Ann.

Dreams to reality

It would be five years before his dream became a reality.

"The owner and the manager of the hotel, John Young, saw my skills and said he would take me to Bermuda with him to continue the work there," he said.

Instead of the usual pruning, weeding and planting, Wilson would be allowed to let his imagination run wild along the miles of green landscape of a hotel in Bermuda.

"He (the manager) said to me, I want you to transform these plants into animals," he said, "Shape them like those at Disney World."

Wilson was happy to comply as he set to work trimming elephants, ducks, chickens and apricots into shape for the next 26 years. "I have nine elephants at my home," he said with a hearty laugh, "Down where I live they even call me the Elephant Man."

Now that Wilson returned home, he is not sitting idly by, as he offers gardening tips to whoever will listen and even teaches children to draw cartoons as often as he can.

"I even went to Hope Gardens two years ago to institute it but nobody came," he said with a shake of his head. He still nurtures dreams of using his skills to beautify the national parks of Jamaica.

"I also want to teach the young people what I know," he said with a twinkle in his aged eyes.