RENOVATIONS PART 3: Shape up your yard

It's not a long way to topiary.

Visit the home of Paul and Setsuko Segawa Dunphy and you'll be greeted near the doorstep by two swans and two German shepherds entwined with greenery.
But that is just the beginning.

What awaits in the backyard of this modest ranch-style home in the Garden Ranch area of Colorado Springs is a handcrafted landscape of fanciful topiary figures. Greenery-festooned deer munch in a flower bed of violas, a huge rabbit with hoe oversees the vegetable garden, and dogs and dolphins and ducks create charming flower-bed tableaus.

As homeowners struggle with ways to make their yards less water-thirsty, few think as creatively as Setsuko, who has transformed a giant patch of dirt into a drought-tolerant topiary garden.

Wearing gloves and wielding wire cutters, she sits on the floor of her basement studio, snipping and molding and bringing to life rolls of nondescript chicken wire. Boxwood is then planted in pots or in the ground, and the topiary inserted over the plants corkscrewed up through the form.

Besides a menagerie of animals, she has made topiaries for customers that resemble golf players and airplanes. She exports her forms abroad, and also sells her topiaries locally through her business, Nature's Creations.

A graduate of Tama Art University in Tokyo, Setsuko was a pioneer in the fabric art movement, exhibiting quilts internationally, and created a series of quilt books. She gave it up years ago when poor eyesight hampered her tiny hand-stitching.

Creating art with landscape greenery is now her passion.

"I love nature and designing with it," she says. She hikes in the mountains for inspiration and gathers stones, unusual wood and materials for her nature sculptures.

She learned bonsai and topiary from her grandfather, who had a nursery in Japan. Before moving to Colorado Springs, the Dunphys owned a nursery in Orange County, Calif., near Disneyland.

When the Dunphys moved here to be near family four years ago, they bought a home with a backyard that was all dirt and weeds. Their landscape renovation is a lesson in how to create a sanctuary without spending a ton of money if you are willing to sweat a lot.

"I dug up the entire yard twice to get rid of the weeds," Setsuko says.

They decided to xeriscape instead of planting water-gulping bluegrass.

And because Paul works full time, at the Air Force Academy, Setsuko laid most of the landscape fabric and 14 tons of river rock. Cost: about $700.

They took out five trees and trimmed two pines to open up the space.

They divided the yard into several areas that included seating around a fire pit; a children's corner with pint-size Adirondack furniture; a main deck for dining and lounging; vegetable and rose gardens; two arbors and a fountain created out of a 900-pound rock they moved in themselves.

Tying it all together is a path made of concrete squares that have been stained black.

Paul, a master craftsman who once had a business making 18th-century furniture replicas, put those skills to work making decks and arbors. He paid attention to detail, even matching the curved decorative skirt on the arbor seat to the decorative trim on the main deck.

He created an ethereal hideaway on a floating deck underneath a canopy of gracefully trimmed non-fruit-bearing cherry trees. (The floating deck was created by placing the frame on cinder blocks.)

Cost of materials for all the structures was about $2,000, well below the $6,000 to $8,000 it would have cost to have the work done by others, Paul estimates.

The result is a yard that has a country-Asian look. And the icing on this landscape cake is the topiaries, which give a whimsical flair to it all.

In winter, the topiaries planted in the ground are left outside, and the potted ones are moved into the garage. They are watered regularly and on nice days set outside in the sunshine.

But during summer, the topiaries are an integral part of the Dunphys' vacation plans.

Setsuko explains: "Our yard is our vacation. We spend every night out here until dark.

"We don't need to go anywhere. This is it."

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Contact the writer: 636-0371 or carol.mcgraw@gazette.com


CONTEST

Do you have a kitchen that's been screaming for a face-lift for the past decade? Is your guest bathroom in desperate need of a new vanity?

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Just send us a photo of the room you'd like to redo and 50 words or fewer about why it needs improvement.

Readers will vote on which room deserves the upgrade, and the owner will get a $1,000 gift certificate to The Home Depot. Contest deadline is Oct. 7. At that time, readers will be able to vote. The winner will be announced on Dec. 2.