Harper's Topiary Garden

This guide to Harper's Topiary Garden in San Diego traces fifty living shrub sculptures back to a lost bet: painter Edna Harper, trained in Chinese brush painting and sumi-e, saw an elephant hiding in a stray honeysuckle vine and told her husband Alex she could prune it into shape. It follows how that one elephant grew into a hillside menagerie, shaped entirely by hand with Edna's longtime gardener Pedro Duran over twenty-eight years, including a herd inspired by a trip to Thailand. Look for the hitchhiker with his thumb out among the animals on the slope.