How to Make a Mandarin Topiary Tree

For a New Year’s Day party, I needed to make some decorations, so I set out to make three of these mandarin topiary trees. They look festive and use mostly natural elements, which is how we like to decorate.

We have a mandarin orange tree in our backyard, which helped save on costs a lot! All I had to purchase were these foam cones from Walmart to stick the toothpicks that were holding the mandarins into.

Another idea I’ve heard was to use apples and other hard fruits to make a cone shape instead of buying the foam cones. I didn’t experiment with this idea, but that could also work if you don’t want to buy the base.

What You’ll Need

• foam cones
• toothpicks
• mandarin oranges(or your choice of fruit*)
• ribbon
• some kind of greenery(rosemary, boxwood, pine, etc.)
• hot glue(optional)

*Any kind of citrus fruit would look gorgeous for a topiary. There are also fruit topiaries, where there are many different kinds of fruits on one topiary. These are beautiful too, if you’re willing to use up all of your fruit 😉 Some other fruits you could use are lemons, limes, apples, pears, cranberries, or other berries.

How to Assemble a Mandarin Topiary

1. Starting at the bottom, make a hole in the foam cone with a toothpick.
2. Stick a toothpick into the mandarin oranges and place them into the hole.
3. One at a time, continue adding mandarins into the cone around the bottom and then work your way all the way up to the top.
4. Fill in the gaps with your choice of greenery.
5. Tie a ribbon and use hot glue to attach it to the top of the mandarin topiary.

If you would like the mandarin topiary to be more secure, you could use hot glue to attach all of the mandarin oranges to the cone. We prefer not to waste fruits and ate all of the mandarins after the party, so we chose not to use hot glue.

Have you ever made a topiary before? Let us know down in the comments which fruits you used! We’d love to hear from our readers.

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