Music and Cats

When we bought our house, our entire front walk - from sidewalk to porch steps - was lined on either side with a dense boxwood hedge about three feet tall. I didn’t much care for the hedge, as its boxy geometry seemed too formal for our Craftsman-ish house, and it prevented people from easily stepping from the walk onto the lawn in our front yard. However, it was among the nicer landscape features in our yard, so it was passed over during the first smiting of the plants. The English ivy covering the side yard, the holly and hawthorne threatening to take over the back yard; those were the first to be vanquished.

For a couple of years, while we continued to pull up the holly and the ivy, we trimmed the hedge gently and infrequently. Neither Paul nor I had dealt with boxwoods before. We did not know how resilient they might be. We did not know how quickly they grew. We maintained the hedge’s boxy cut, but did not quite contain its growth. When it attained almost an additional foot in height, I began to feel hemmed in. At 5′-1″, I could see over the hedge, but not by much. It was time for more radical measures. I read up on boxwoods, and having satisfied myself that I could not easily kill them, I got out the chainsaw.

One weekend and half a dozen full yard waste bags later, the hedges along our walk were gone. In the place of each formerly bushy boxwood were several 9″-12″ high, 1/2″ - 1″ diameter stumps. A few sad, yellowish leaves, long hidden from the sunlight, stuck out randomly from each abbreviated branch. They were pitiful. Paul was apalled, and asked me please not to whack the shrubs lining the steps up from the sidewalk.

Shortly after I took the chainsaw to the boxwoods along the walk, I was talking with one of our neighbors, an avid gardener whose yard is always lovely. She congratulated me on having cut back the hedge, and assured me that my rows of ugly little stumps would soon be covered in fresh new growth. She told me that she had once pruned those same boxwoods, as a wedding gift when our home’s previous owner remarried in 1995. At that time, the hedges had been over seven feet tall, and growing!

Needless to say, the boxwoods recovered. (Managing to kill an established boxwood hedge would’ve been a more impressive feat than pruning one back hard). Last summer, when the stumps were completely hidden by shiny new leaves, I began to shape the new growth into somewhat flattened spheres. I didn’t want topiary shapes, but more informal, softly rounded mounds, perhaps 18″ tall.

I noticed recently that my tidy little mounds of boxwood were getting out of hand. The smallest were knee height on me, the largest almost to my waist. Since I pruned them back so hard a couple of years ago, however, all that growth is small, soft twigs and leaves. A couple of hours of clipping with old-fashioned hedge clippers, and they’re back to the size I want. (”Before” on the left of the photo, “after” on the right.) Actually, they’re a bit smaller than I want, as I’m not really so good with the hedge clippers, and had to do a lot of evening up of their little ovoid forms. I know that I should train them more carefully and consistently, pinching off new shoots individually until I have exactly the shape and size that I want. Or we could replace them with dwarf boxwoods, whose natural habit would be more appropriate for the location. Perhaps someday.

Right now, the remaining boxy hedges on either side of the steps up from the sidewalk are bothering me. I think I have a free couple of hours this weekend. Where is that chainsaw?

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