Homage to the Boxwood

An Homage to the Boxwood

The boxwood (Buxus sempivirens) is one of my all-time favorite plants. Right now, their beautiful, fresh green new growth is emerging. Seeing this transformation from dark evergreen always sends me down memory lane. Yes, I daydream about boxwoods I have known. From the smallest “box ball” to some of the monsters around campus, I have come to know and love the personalities of many boxwoods both locally and abroad.

Local specimens are easy to find. The large shrub thrives on the mountain. Two plantings on University Avenue come immediately to mind, each exemplifying the range of uses of which box are capable. The box lining the front walk to Willie Cocke’s are majestic, at least 15’ tall. I often see children from the elementary school marveling at hollow interior of the box tunnel, the gnarled branches seen exposed underneath. At Kathryn Varnell’s home, a few doors closer to campus, the driveway is lined with substantial, well clipped box, adding a more formal feeling to the approach.

The community garden gazebo also boasts some 15’ tall beauties. They nestle against the stone and timber gazebo, an arts and crafts type affair, creating a spot of intimacy amidst the neighboring gardens. I spent some time last summer cleaning them out with the help of Nate Wilson, Domain Manager, and other University folks. By “cleaning out”, I mean removing 4”-6” diameter intruders like hackberry, poplar, and poison ivy. This generated vast amounts of brush. Only with the coordination of Nate and the University in the hauling of brush was the project feasible.

Personally, I have rescued three boxwoods for my home, and I have only just begun. Sally Krebs provided me with some root stock from 100 year old plants which had been removed. These had lined the side of her house, stretching high enough to get into the eaves. For better or worse, she decided to remove them, resorting to chaining them to a pickup truck and yanking them out, a method I have used in other circumstances, with other plants.

The carcasses were heaped near the house. When I went by one day to pick up Myers, best friends with her son, I noticed the tangled roots and branches of the pile, and the great void left behind by the house. How long they had been there, I do not know, but I investigated regardless. Lo and behold, a few still had life left in them. I whacked them to about a foot and heeled them in at Natural Bridge for about a year before planting them here on Prince Lane about 3 years ago. They have fully recovered.

Another one, found at the brush dump, is putting on new growth. I found it and its partner lying in the sun last July. The partner, as predicted, did not make it. The survivor was more than ½ dead. Now, the remaining ½ of the plant is putting on substantial new growth. Yes, I babied it. After coming home during a dry time, I had a load of compost mulching it and watered frequently.

My first Christmas on the mountain, in 1998, saw a pretty fair ice storm. Upshire Puckette called soon thereafter, asking me to clean up the impressive box which had taken a substantial hit along the front of her home. I spent several days working on the cleanup. My goal was to remove the damaged and broken limbs while leaving the plants looking as best they could.

Of course, this meant a vast amount of trimmings. I can remember a January evening, freezing in the dark, sticking cuttings from the trimmings in a propagation bed. Now, after they have lived in Midway, Jump-Off, on Natural Bridge Rd., and here in Bobtown, they are two feet tall and ready for transplanting into the landscape.

I had intended to plant them along the fence by the drive, ultimately creating a 6’ hedge to block out the real world. Granted, I would be lucky to live long enough to see this. However, I can remember a Thanksgiving with my cousin Billy, at the farm his father purchased early in the 20^th century, marveling over the towering box he had planted as a boy. Billy was 72 at the time. The box are by far as big as any I have ever seen in the US. So, maybe there’s hope.

Then, I received some news which was a blessing in disguise. The house across the street, which the University owns, is slated for removal ahead of building a new dorm. This house has some of the prettiest boxwoods on campus, and I have managed to claim salvage rights to them. So, IF I can find someone with a back hoe to help me, for free, I will have a fairly instant hedge. They will face the chainsaw soon, whacking them from their current 10’ to something more manageable, like 5’.

Flashing back to the rejuvenation of the boxwood at Cheekwood, I remember how ferocious one can be with the box. The box there had grown scraggly, had a lot of dead in them, and needed rejuvenation. A specialist came from Monticello to oversee the project, and whack they did. Several of the stumps left were several inches in diameter. These stumps were left from branches eliminated to get light into the heart of the plants, from the plants being topped at about 6’.

This is a task which I have, to a degree, executed a multitude of times – crawling “inside” the plant and removing dead wood is the beginning, followed by removing rubbing, diseased, and exceptionally long branches. I am always amazed at how much wood can be removed from a plant, each twig removed allowing more light.

All of this is but blather when compared to one of the greatest privileges of my horticultural career – pruning Rosemary Verey’s knot garden, an epic task of microscopic precision. Before getting into that, a thorough definition of “knot” is required.

Boxwood is very tolerant of pruning, as described above. Topiary, the training of plants into various geometric or animal shapes, is fascinating to me, especially when I consider how long it takes for these plants to grow. Parterre, the shearing of box to form tight designs, is another use of box. The French and Italians used this extensively during the Renaissance for the sculpted look it provides.

However, clipped box does not a knot make. As Mrs. Verey explained, a true knot has over and unders, as would rope tied in a knot.

Alamy Images

A sculptural green-on-green knot garden by Rosemary Verey

This knot, at Barnsley House, Mrs. Verey’s home garden, is two distinct knots next to each other. One, “the true lovers’ knot” is in the rear in this photo. Both designs are from medieval tapestries. They are featured in plan view in her book “The Making of a Garden”, about the 40+ years she spent developing her estate. The knots are next to a patio attached to the late 17^th century manor house.

When assigned the task, I followed Mrs. Verey to the tool shed. Reaching for a 6” electric shear, Mrs. Verey gave me her trademark skewed grin and, eyes twinkling, queried “And what are those for?” I assumed this would be the tool of choice for clipping the knots. The Yank was, once again, operating on American tactics. I was soon informed, in elegant detail, how wrong I was when clipping her knots.

She handed me some grass shears, as they are called on this side of the Atlantic. A downscaled version of the typical hedge shear, these 8” scissor blades were operated manually with handles like the average secateurs. Then, rummaging in the potting shed, she dug up a few empty plastic bags which had contained soil or some such. “Follow me,” she said.

I had discussed the knot and my enthusiasm for the form multiple times with RV. She, in turn, had directed me to various gardens with excellent examples of ancient British Box of all shapes and sizes. One garden had rooms divided by extraordinary walls of sheared box, topped with crenulations such as one would find on an ancient castle. To me, it was an honor and a privilege to clip RV’s knots. The head gardener saw it as more of a fence white washing a la Mark Twain.

Little did I know at the time, but I was entering a 4 day Zen journey with the Buxus. By this point in life, Mrs. Verey didn’t move as swiftly as she did once on the tennis court, her ankles swollen and arthritic. Following her was an exercise in patience by itself. We arrived at the knot and the lesson began.

First and foremost, I was forbidden electric shears because they throw clippings all over the place, making a proper, tidy job impossible. What’s more, she stressed, one goof with “electrics” and you could screw up the slow growing knot for years. The hand shears would prevent excess damage from a mistake or slip up. The plastic bags would be placed along either side of the base of the plants, keeping the tiny clippings out of the impeccably clean gravel framing the knots, leaving the space totally free of unsightly debris.

The hand shears, she explained, will also slow me down, making me think about what I am doing as it is a very intricate undertaking. The “overs and unders” must be precise for the shape to have the contrasts needed. “Do you have your book?” she asked, referring to her latest, “The Making of a Garden”. The drawing of the knots, a watercolor in plan view, showed the subtleties of the knots, mapping the over and unders clearly.

After going down the lane and across the street to the cottage she lent me, I retrieved my book. Returning to the knots, I placed the book, opened to the knots’ picture, on the box to be damn sure I didn’t screw this up. Of all parts of the garden, this was one of the most photographed and replicated. I would later find an attempt at the design in Nashville.

She was a woman of few words, all of which were inordinately important, always delivered with the expectation they would be followed to the letter, and God save the man who veered from them. I saw her retribution once. It was not pretty. A 78 year old woman violently scolding a young horse of a man who had transposed step one with step two.

So, taking all of this very seriously, I set to with the clipping of the knot. The other gardeners laughed at how serious and deliberate I was with the task, but I was oblivious. I was in hog heaven. The exercise required total attention, taking me to an out of body type sensation, an “in the zone” feeling shared by few other experiences. Sand sculpture, drawing, or a Grateful Dead concert are the only other activities I can describe as having the same effect.

The process, at the beginning of the day, started out as tedious. As time went by, and hours turned to days, the subtle magic of the knot unveiled itself to me. Since I was a young child, I have been fascinated by the manipulations of boxwood. Now, I was participating in a centuries’ old practice, an art form dating back to the 1300s at least. Once “in the zone”, time not only stopped, it ceased to exist. My progress was etched in razor sharp corners and fluid over and unders. Never had I felt so close to a plant.

As I was finishing up the trimming, at the end of a day, a woman emerged from behind the house and stood silently, studying the knots. I did not notice her for a second and gasped with surprise when I did. She asked if I were finished, and complimented the work. I said that, yes, I was just about to finish. I worked until well after the usual quitting time to knock out the project. The next day, working on the herb garden knots, I saw the woman again, just after starting work.

She had arrived at the patio knots at sunrise to capture the knots at the utmost of drama. The slanting pinkish sun colored the surrounding gardens in surreal beauty and exaggerated the contrasts in the knots. It turned out she was a photographer who was often featured in gardening publications. She had been working with RV, photographing the gardens. She relayed that RV made several comments praising my job of trimming, quoting her as saying it had “never looked so well”. Over the following couple of years, I actually saw some of these photos in various magazines.

I still have precious memories of the experience, a talisman of which are the clippings, now preserved for 17 years, which fell in the crack between the pages of her book, where the knots are mapped and which I used as a guide. Inscribed inside the front cover are her compliments on a job well done.