Elegant fall pumpkin topiary

Make your own elegant fall pumpkin topiary.

It’s September.  Is it beginning to feel like fall in your neck of the woods?  Well, we don’t have fall here in Florida, so we just kind of pretend. 😉  If we put out real pumpkins or gourds they would rot within a few days, so we use lots of faux plastic decorations here. And, trust me, you don’t carve your Halloween pumpkin until October 30th here, either.

But, I LOVE fall!  I love the rich, warm colors and the yummy flavors.  Can we say pumpkin-spice everything?  

And one of the best things I have seen popping up in magazines and all over Pinterest are outdoor stacked pumpkin topiary pictures.  They are every design imaginable and I WANT ONE. So, I decided to rope in my hubby and make our own.  I am so proud of how they turned out and they were really easy to do.

Skill level needed.

Now, first let me say, even though you mainly see my hubby in the pictures, it was because I was behind the camera. This really is an easy project to do.

The only thing I don’t think I could have done that he did was use the drill to cut the holes.  However, I could have done them using a utility knife, but it would have taken a bit longer.

Supplies.

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We bought a large plastic planter and  3 different sized pumpkins for each topiary.  I really like the contrast of the white one in the middle. I had a really hard time finding the small ones, however.  So, we ended up getting just the right size at Lowe’s.  The only problem was that they were lighted jack o’ lanterns with a face on one side.  They were really cheap, so I went ahead and got them and turned them around so the faces didn’t show.  They work fine! And like my hubby said, we can turn them around the other way for Halloween, so the faces show. 🙂

I had some great coupons for Joann Fabric and Michael’s so I got 2 large bunches of silk fall flowers and a small package of silk fall maple leaves. We also got a package of floral foam to hold the flowers and a small package of decorative acorns on long stems, but I decided not to use the acorns.  Other items we already had were my hot glue gun, serrated kitchen knife, long toothpicks, needle-nosed pliers, drill, and tomato stakes. 

By the way, November is coming quickly…

So, let me show you how easy it is to make a fall pumpkin topiary!

The planter.

To make sure the planter didn’t tip over easily, we added a concrete sprinkler donut at the bottom of the planter.  Then we stacked 4 small plastic pots to take up some volume.  Next was the potting soil. We patted the soil down so it was about 2″ from the top to leave room for the foam.

We decided to use potting soil because after the season is over, we can take out the topiaries and then plant poinsettias for Christmas, and add other real flowers throughout the rest of the year.

The foam.

The foam came in 6 rectangles, stacked 3 high.  So we used our longest serrated kitchen knife to cut each stack of 3 in half and arranged it in a square with a piece in the middle.  Then we cut triangles out of another piece to fill in the corners. The foam is dense but really, really easy to cut.

We attached all of the pieces together using long toothpicks. We pushed in the ends of the toothpicks using the flat side of the knife.

The stake.

Once the foam was set on top of the soil, we just pushed the tomato stake straight through the foam and soil all the way to the bottom of the planter. I didn’t take a picture of it, but we did end up having to cut off about 2″ of the top of the stake once we got all of the pumpkins on it, but that will vary depending on the size of your pumpkins and the stake.

Making the holes in the pumpkins.

As I mentioned earlier, the orange pumpkins were designed to be cut, so even though we used a drill, a utility knife would have worked.

The middle pumpkin is the hardest one to do because we wanted to leave the stem of the bottom pumpkin so it would sit inside the middle one and give it more stability on the stake. That is why we needed to make the bottom hole much bigger than a single drill hole. So, my hubby used his hole saw for that.

For the small pumpkin, all we had to do was pop off the light insert.  It was the easiest of all!

Love doing DIY and crafts?

Thread the pumpkins on the stake.

No explanations are necessary for this one, except make sure the stems of the bottom pumpkins fit into the holes of the pumpkin above.  The middle picture is deceiving because you can’t see that there is still a good 5″ of the green stake still poking out of the top of the white pumpkin.  But it is there, I promise.

Once you get them threaded on, make sure that the smallest pumpkin sits flush on the top of the middle one.  Otherwise, it will wobble in the wind. This is the time to cut down your stake.  Once I had all of the decorative leaves glued in between the pumpkins, I did hot glue the small pumpkin onto the middle one to keep it secure.

The flowers.

Since my flowers were in bunches, I had to cut them apart.  I always use my needle-nosed pliers to cut wire stems.  The pliers work great if you put the stem as far down into the pliers as possible.

This is the fun part – arranging the flowers.

Be creative.  If you are doing more than 1 topiary, you can have the flowers look the same in both, or you can mix them up.  Do whatever you like best.  

I did have several large sunflowers and Gerbera daisies for each topiary, as well as a couple of long drooping stems of berries, so I did put those near the front on both. But otherwise, I put in the rest of the flowers differently for each pot.

I really liked the way the topiaries looked once the flowers were arranged.  And I could easily have finished right then.

But I decided the majority of the color was from the flowers at the bottom, so I decided to add a few leaves.

The leaves.

The leaves were silk and there were a couple of shiny gold fabric ones in the mix as well. I didn’t want to put the flowers all the way around the tops of the pumpkins, but you certainly could if you wanted to.  

I glued 2 large leaves on the top of the bottom pumpkin first. Then added a gold one in the middle of those leaves and a smaller one just under the gold one.  That was just enough of a pop of color. I did a smaller version of the same thing at the top of the middle pumpkin.  Once I was finished with the leaves I glued the top pumpkin to the middle one.

Here is what the finished fall pumpkin topiary looked like inside.

What a nice burst of autumn color!!!

The finished fall pumpkin topiary outside.

This is such an elegant way to add a touch of autumn to your outdoor decor, even if you don’t have any fresh fall leaves right then!

I think the topiaries, along with the wreaths we already had, were the perfect fall touch (even though it was 93° when we made these, which is why we did them inside.)  😉

UPDATE… Change the look

When I moved last year, the pots were too big for my new porch, so I dissembled these and reworked them to fit in new, more narrow pots.

Didn’t need to buy anything new (except these pots) – I was even able to cut down and re-use the same florist foam. Score!

Here are my topiaries this year, on my new front porch:

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A twist on your fall pumpkin topiary for Halloween.

Remember how I said the smallest pumpkins were actually jack-o-lanterns?

Well, here are the topiaries turned around so that the jack-o-lantern faces show.

Aren’t they cute????

and here:

I also switched out my fall wreaths for the spooky eyeball Halloween wreaths I just made.  They are really inexpensive and easy to make, too.  Here’s a close-up.

The full directions can be found here: Spooky eyeball Halloween wreath.

I was so excited to make these and share them with you!  I am definitely ready for fall now!

Do you like how they turned out?  Please share this post with others if so!

Happy fall, y’all!

~ Pam