I adore box hedging. For me it evokes cottage gardens - wild exuberant planting behind a neatly clipped border of hedging - perhaps it says something about my personality?
32 years ago SH and I were married at a beautiful local botanical gardens. We walked down an aisle with gorgeous box hedges either side. A couple of weeks later I visited the garden again and took several small clippings from those hedges and grew them on to eventually create a hedge of our own.
Unfortunately that particular hedge stayed behind at our previous home, but we did plant new hedges around our herb and rose garden when we moved to our new garden.
There are a few downsides to buxus sempervirens.
- it is a slow grower in comparison to other small hedges
- it is a greedy little plant and does suck a lot of the goodness and moisture out of the soil. Not great for vegetable gardens.
- it is prone to a disease called Box Blight.
Several months ago we had friends from out of town come to stay. They had recently lost their entire hedge to blight and one of them was certain he could see the beginning of blight in our hedge. I was devastated. I sharpened my secateurs, cut out the offending branches, put them in the wheelie bin and then soaked my secateurs and gloves in bleach and disinfectant.
Touch wood (box wood haha) the hedge is looking happy and healthy as you can see from this lovely new spring growth. Fingers crossed our little hedge continues to thrive.
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