How dose topiary work ? Do I have to start with a squirrel & work through or can I decide what I want to start with ?

The red trail will always start with either a grey squirrel or a skunk, and end with a unicorn.  So once you know the first animal, you know the order for that pot.  You don't get to choose.

Oh ok thanks, not played this before , so I can’t put a plant out to attract a skunk etc ?

What’s the red trail ?

1. Do you have a topiary seed? No? Find one. Yes? Go to 2

2. Buy red topiary dish, plant topiary seed.

3. Wait /dust bush til Fully grown.

4. When fully grown right click on bush, a message will appear, and tell you which animal it needs you to attract. (Red bush is skunk or grey squirrel).

5. Plant and dust to fully grown, Rosa amora for skunk, or bellis for g.s. (dust bellis to the right colour), or a bonsai. Put out their correct food.

6. Attract one skunk/g.s. ... This is called the TRIM, as the bush takes the shape of skunk/g.s.

7. Pull the attracting flower, as you now need all your wildlife to be Topiary skunk/g.s.

8. Click on the topiary bush, you will get a message that shows you how many top skunk/g.s. you need to attract, and how many you need to find in other gardens. This is called the TRAIL. Red Trail for the red dish, in three sections, one for each wildlife. Red Trail gets three trims, skunk/g.s., g.s./skunk, and finally, unicorn

9. As soon as you have completed the skunk/g.s. section, the BUSH will REPLANT.

10. IMPORTANT: you now get 5 days while it grows, or you can dust it. Later trails include Ready for Harvest plants, and you can plan ahead for those. I recommend doing Red Trail a few times, so you get the hang of it, and in any case, you have to repeat Red Trail 7 times.

11. When the bush is fully grown again, click on the bush, read the message, it will tell you to attract one g.s./skunk, plant accordingly, attract and hunt the right number of topiary wildlife.

12. THE UNICORN fully dusted will be ready for harvest in 5 days, the same time it takes your bush to become fully grown.

13. IMPORTANT: you can plan ahead for your unicorn, or, you might have the magic unicorn pot, reward for doing Ponds Unicorns.

14. Same routine for the unicorn trail.

15. If your bush turns ready for harvest BEFORE you have completed each section of the Red Trail, you have to replant and start again.

16. When you've done one red trail, you will be able to buy an orange topiary dish, and when you do, you'll start to see how the trail accumulates. Orange trail is for six wildlife, including the three you've already done. They appear in random order, all except the new unicorn, which is always last in trail. When you complete Orange, you will find you can't do Yellow until you've completed two Red Trails... and so on, all the way up to Violet.

17. See the Topiary Trail thread in Forums for the complicated link to how to find out which order your trail animals will be in, it's different for each dish in each garden. That's not important for Red Trail, as both wildlife are attracted by fully grown plants.

18. Once you've got past Red Trail, you will accumulate plenty of Topiary Seeds as you go along.

I'm sure others will add more info to this!! Off to find the link

https://www.myarduinoprojects.com/flcalculator/

Link to calculator for showing the order wildlife tasks inside each trail. You will need to have the individual number for each topiary dish. Right click on the dish, and read the legend which appears, on computer or laptop. If only on phone, just ask in the forums.

https://www.freedomfairies.com/fairyland-guide/topiary-trails-guide

https://www.freedomfairies.com/fairyland-guide/topiary-trails-guide/topiary-wildlife-requirement-chart

Those links should be useful. Topiaries are pretty simple, just quite repetitive and they go on a long time!

Red trails are simple, so I think it's good to do a couple of these to get a feel for how it works before progressing. Remember that each time you go up a colour (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) you get another three animals added to the trail list. My second link is a good illustration of this and shows how many times you need to complete each colour of trail.

As you progress through the colours you also get some wildlife that need RFH plants (crane, elephant, leopard, badger, woodpecker, etc) - it's important you plan accordingly so you don't risk running out of time on the bush.

Also once you know the wildlife order for a pot - keep it so you know what's coming next time!

I found doing multiple trails side by side worked best for me and kept me busy, but some prefer one at a time, find an approach that works for you. I wanted to finish as quickly as possible so I usually had at least three trails going at any one time. It still look me very nearly a year to finish!

Good luck!

WOW a& I only needed to attract any 2 topiary for the Pottery Lottery lol thanks ladies !