In our quest to use native plants within a formal garden design, let’s begin with boxwoods. We inherited 130 individual boxwood shrubs. (Yep, 130!) Most are aligned in hedges, providing one of the most tangible relics of a formal garden design.
According to the American Boxwood Society, boxwood is “Man’s Oldest Garden Ornament.” Introduced to the United States from Europe in the mid-1600s, its durability, flexibility and evergreen foliage have made it the perfect plant (all 217 varieties of it) for hedges, parterres, topiary, bonsai, you name it — staples of formal garden design still popular today.
There are native plant alternatives to boxwood to define formal garden spaces. However, because we inherited so many boxwoods (did I mention we have 130 of them?) and because boxwood is generally not considered an aggressive threat to our natural areas (unlike the massive honeysuckles and buckthorns we inherited, which will be the subject of a future post), we decided to use our boxwood inheritance to anchor our formal/native garden design refresh.
Our initial challenge has been to practice botanical dentistry. Among the virtues of boxwood is its durability. Generally, it does not require a lot of care and attention, other than periodic pruning to desired shape. However, winter burn is a not uncommon malady. Without sufficient care and maintenance for who knows how many years, 20% of our boxwood hedge “smiles” have missing or decayed “teeth” thanks to winter burn.
Fortunately, with so much healthy stock on hand, we were able to repair the boxhood hedge smiles in the front yard and, most significantly, to re-enclose what we call the Kitchen Garden — the garden space immediately outside our kitchen windows — with a complete boxwood hedge. What remained of the Kitchen Garden hedge was and is in decent shape. Transplanting 20 mature boxwoods from elsewhere in the yard to reestablish the hedge was no picnic — especially since the individual shrubs in our inherited hedges were planted approximately 6″ apart, compared to the current recommended practice of 12″ to 24″. Which is why our Kitchen Garden hedge smile still looks a little gappy, but we anticipate the transplants, with more room to grow, will be healthier and spread out in time.
Prior to re-enclosing the Kitchen Garden, it was difficult to discern the interior design intention for this space. We removed several individual boxwood shrubs except one — the biggest, healthiest example of the practice of planting individuals as “specimens,” showing off the different ways they may be shaped. We also removed a huge, honeysuckle (beautiful but aggressively detrimental to our natural areas) and ground out a massive stump of unknown species. With a clean palette, my wife and I have decided to anchor the space with a water feature — a staple of many a formal garden and a magnet for attracting birds.
Ultimately, boxwood is about infrastructure, which is where all good garden design begins. With the formal hedge restored to the Kitchen Garden (along with some drainage issues remedied along the foundation of the house) we are ready to begin our pond design, constructed with lots of native limestone harvested from failed garden bed edging on site, and teeming with native plants. Stay tuned. (And wish us luck!)
