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the old boxwood
To honor and celebrate the old English 'dwarf' boxwood.
Boxwood is the earliest garden ornamental cultivated by humans,
with dwarf box, Buxus sempervirens 'Suffruticosa', one of our
most prized garden heirlooms.
A global blight is quickly taking many established dwarf-box plantings. Various treatments are showing at least some success, but famous box gardens, as in Williamsburg, are being destroyed, and leading gardeners and plant pathologists seem to have agreed: stop planting dwarf box.
After 5,000 years in our gardens, is there any point to a yard without boxwoods?
Here is a gallery of significant dwarf-box plantings, and related images. This gallery will develop over time, and begins with an archive of present-day and historical plantings in and around Hillsborough, North Carolina, and other areas of the state.
this is a very early version of this site. content will evolve.
All images by J. Holcomb unless otherwise noted.
“They walked over the crackling leaves in the garden, between the lines of Box, breathing its fragrance of eternity; for this is one of the odors which carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past; if we ever lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there was Box growing on it."
– Elsie Venner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1861
– Engraving: Buxus, from: The Herball, or,
Generall historie of plantes gathered by John Gerarde
of London, 1597
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