Green Animals Topiary Garden

The 1859 Victorian Brayton house museum contains a small display of vintage kids toy and the original family furnishings.

It consisted of 7 acres (28,000 m2) of land, a white clapboard summer residence, farm outbuildings, a pasture and a vegetable garden.

Carreiro was recruited to design and maintain ornamental and edible gardens as part of a self-sufficient estate.

Besides planting fruit trees, perennial beds, herb and vegetable gardens, Carreiro experimented with trimming some fast-growing shrubs into unique forms.

Mendonca, the son of a nurseryman and dairy farmer, was hired to make repairs in the Brayton garden after a hurricane damaged it in 1938.

Mendonca married Carreiro's daughter, Mary, and together they lived on the grounds overlooking Narragansett Bay.

Today, modern topiaries often are trained on a metal frame or trellis to shorten the time the transformation takes place.

Upon her death in 1972, at the age of 94, Miss Brayton left Green Animals to The Preservation Society of Newport County.

The oldest topiaries were started from boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) seedlings in 1912 shaped from California privet (Ligustrum ovalifolium).

Privet is a semi evergreen shrub is fast growing with dark green, elliptic leaves.

Some conservation metal supports have been discreetly positioned inside the forms to provide stability in wind and snow.

Newer topiaries are made of English yew (Taxus baccata) a sturdy needled evergreen that requires pruning only once or twice a year.

Vegetables from the garden are maintained by a community farm program and the produce is used by the Rhode Island Food Bank.