This month, Jim Cable is replacing ravaged box hedging with Japanese holly, adding winter protection for half-hardy treasures, and planting hardneck garlic
As autumn cedes to winter, the paving by the back door remains dark and wet even on sunny days. Everything is glistening with moisture, from the spiders’ webs that span the borders to the colourful rugs of fallen leaves below the ginkgo and the Japanese maple. The body of soil in the Deanery garden will only slowly relinquish the heat of summer, and water and warmth help any new plants in the garden establish a good root system before they hunker down for the season ahead. Time to make a change either side of the path that leads to our front door.
The Deanery’s cottagey frontal symmetry has the feel of a country parsonage. The borders in the front garden are accordingly informal and planted with a tapestry of garden stalwarts: hardy geraniums, astrantias and hostas supplemented with summer flowering annuals, Ammi majus, Bupleurum rotundifolium and cosmos. Either side of the central path a low box hedge adds definition to this jumble and in previous autumns, even as the border plants dwindled, kept the overall look tidy and by design. However, the formerly shiny leaved edging has been ravaged by larvae of the box tree moth and now looks distinctly tatty. Back in June, searching out and squishing the caterpillars was a daily chore but I lost the battle and it is time to rip out the box and plant up the boundary afresh.
The white roots of the box extend almost a metre into the border as a dense mat. No wonder the annuals sown near the hedge struggled. Finding another fault in the box lessens my guilt as I chop away and wrench it from the ground adding it to the bonfire pile. The sheer body of roots taken out leaves a substantial dent in the bed. I level things up by forking in a barrowload of garden compost.
There are a few options for replacing the box. I could go for a lavender, ‘Loddon Blue’ or ‘Munstead’ say, but one end of the path is partly shaded and I fear it would not grow evenly along the hedge’s length. I want the neat formal quality of box, so it’s a toss-up between Euonymus japonicus ‘Green Spire’ and a variety of the spineless Japanese holly, Ilex crenata. The holly wins as a box lookalike. There are several varieties available: I. crenata ‘Dark
