Trim the animals every two weeks, geometrics more often. Use shears for boxwood sheep, bonsai scissors for doves of birdsfoot-ivy.

Dinosaurs, elephants and whales should be grown from olive trees. Reindeer and carousel horses look colorful in pyracantha. Giraffes and ostriches are best with Italian cypress.

Tuck sphagnum moss nests under ducks and swans. To grow a peacock, start with a quail, and let the tail spread. Try fields of small bears like the ones grown on bogs in Holland two thousand years ago.

Teardrop-shaped ivy makes the best heart. If you keep a heart indoors too long, spidermites will spin webs on the dust. Be sure to take your heart outdoors at least once a week, to hose it off.

Fill in the belly of each creature before it gets shaded, because plants love to grow toward the sun, and once they reach upward, they won't come back down.  

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Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban-American author of several novels, most recently The Poet-Slave (forthcoming from Henry Holt). Short works appear in such journals as Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Caribbean Review, and Hawai'i Pacific Review. Awards include a Cintas Fellowship, a San Diego Book Award, and most recently, a 2005 Willow Review Poetry Award. Margarita lives in central California, where she enjoys hiking and helping her husband with his volunteer work for a wilderness search-and-rescue dog-training program.
 

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