THE PROBLEM SOLVER
Professor Buczacki is a horticultural expert, writer and former chair of Gardeners' Question Time
Paul and Julie Leadbeater, by email
Stefan says: Your box hedge is approximately 60cm high and it appears all the leaves have turned brown over winter and the hedge seems to be dying. You then ask a series of questions: should you just leave this to nature to recover? Are you able to obtain a remedy to revitalise the hedge? Should you pull up the whole hedge and start again with a new hedge? Or is the problem in the soil and not the hedge?
Unfortunately, you did not send a photograph and don’t say where you live. So as there are two or three possible explanations, I’ll go through them one by one.
First, there is the possibility of a seriously hard frost because although box is a hardy native plant, the foliage can be browned in extreme circumstances.
The second possibility is box blight, which is now a truly common disease almost everywhere, though its occurrence across the country does not seem to be uniform. Although the foliage is browned, the more typical symptom is of bare patches of twiggy growth where the leaves have fallen and, in my experience, it is rare for an entire hedge to be affected in one fell swoop. Nonetheless, it’s especially prevalent on low growing, clipped box hedges with tight branching within which moisture accumulates.
Athird possibility is an attack by the caterpillar of the box moth, which is now sp
