During this New Year’s first weekend, gardens are showing their underlying bones. After a week of Christmassy indulgence, few of their owners are able to do likewise. I have stayed in shape, thanks to forking over the garden in intermittent intervals between the rains. In return, the garden has made me think about its backbone. I recommend a rethink.
The backbone to be thought about is evergreen. When I bought the garden, its backbone was feathery, composed of tall hedges of Leyland cypress which divided it into separate compartments, one for each of the flats into which the house had been divided. I pulled out the cypress trees, about 150 of them, by pushing at them with the front bucket of a mechanical digger. As their roots had run sideways under the surrounding soil, they came out quite easily, like brown varicose veins being ripped out of the soil. If you are bothered by Leyland cypress trees, long past a controllable shape, remember their roots are easy to remove.
I replaced them with a varied backbone, aware of an old rule among designers that at least a third of a well-furnished garden should be evergreen. I think it still applies, even in the smallest spaces: it is a rule which most of the fashionable attempts at “rewilding” ignore. My main evergreen replacements, the garden’s future bones, were pyracanthas, cotoneasters, skimmias, sarcococcas, yew and box. Their progress has varied, as the past year has exemplified.
The crucial element has been box. It began by resisting long droughts in the 1990s, never losing its glossy green leaves and accepting to be cut yearly into flat rectangles, the building blocks for much of the garden’s plan. At that time it seemed the perfect plant for gardens of the future. Then box blight began to invade and leave dead growth in box bushes, followed by box moth, which spread from London and the south. In May this year the moths were starting to munch my box in the Cotswolds and reduce it to a brown skeleton.
The glossy-leaved Sarcococca confusa planted below pleached hornbeams © Carole Drake/Gap Photos; owners Lucy and James Nelson
One recommended riposte is to set traps with pheromone lures for the offenders and to keep on emptying them throughout the season. In small urban gardens this trapping works well, but for big box plantings in big country gardens this method is laborious and not really effective. It reduces the invaders but it does not eliminate them. Major designers and maintainers of big box hedges and parterres in public gardens use a spray instead. One option is a spray using nematodes but it needs constant reapplication.
Another option is a no-chemical spray which applies a naturally occurring bacterium, one that destroys the stomach lining of the larvae of box moths if they ingest it. Dipel is one such commercial spray, though it is not licensed for use by amateur gardeners in the UK. Sprays with the active bacterium are presented as safe for bees, ladybirds and wildlife, in my professional experience correctly (en-topbuxus.com for more details). They are not chemical sprays and will not harm butterflies or insects on the wing. Professionally applied, Dipel has brought our box hedging and box rectangles in Oxford through moth-infested 2025 in fine shape. The long dry spring and summer did them no favours but the prolific rains since September have helped them to grow on again in fresh green finery.
Remember that yew bushes taller than 3 feet or so may be a cheering sight when first planted, but they are an unnecessary expense as yew grows on best if planted when 1-2ft tall
Amateur gardeners should certainly feed their box hedging. From April onwards I use Topbuxus Health Mix, which contains balanced nitrogen, phosphate, potash and magnesium, and has no synthetic chemicals. One tablet, dissolved in one litre of water, becomes a spray for box leaves and if used four or five times a year will help box bushes to reshoot wherever moth has begun to strike. It is applied to the leaves only, not to the soil. I have, however, given up on new plantings of little Buxus suffruticosa, a traditional edging for older vegetable gardens: it is too difficult to apply a nematode spray exactly to each of the young plants. Bigger Buxus sempervirens is easier to protect.
Yew is in fine shape too, still the toughest evergreen for British conditions. In 2025 I relearnt a lesson the hard way: never plant yew bushes at the beginning of a long spring and summer drought. They begin to turn brown at the tips and then die away below, never recovering even when watering is again possible. The problem is to know in advance when a drought is about to begin. Even root-balled yews in good lumps of soil are best planted between November and mid-February. Remember that yew bushes taller than 3 feet or so may be a cheering sight when first planted, but they are an unnecessary expense as yew grows on best if planted when 1-2ft tall. Bigger ones, beloved by many designers, are a pricey shortcut to nothing extra in the long run.
Cotoneaster Cornubia in November © Howard Rice/Gap Photos
Pyracantha saphyr Cadaune © Adrian James/Gap Photos
Since box moth and box blight there have been fears that box’s excellent relation, evergreen sarcococca, will suffer too. I rate the glossy-leaved green Sarcococca confusa as the finest choice for a loosely clipped low evergreen hedge, an essential sort of bone. Box moth will be regrouping to assault my garden from next spring onwards, but its various lengths of Sarcococa confusa are all unharmed so far without any spraying. Do not plant bushes of it too closely together, three per 6ft being as tightly packed as its health needs.
The extra beauty of this evergreen, known as Christmas box, is the sweet scent of the little white flowers in its leaves in winter, especially if branches are picked and brought indoors. I am enjoying it at its best right now while thinking that the plant is the answer for anyone who needs more green garden bones at a low height. It is good, too, by the shadier sides of a house.
Pyracanthas and cotoneasters, taller options, are still having a magnificent time. Their branches have been covered since October with more berries than I ever remember, truly a blessing for Christmas and post-Christmas indoor decoration. In the mild run-up to Christmas they remained fully evergreen, whereas a hard winter will cost them some of their greenery. One hazard is the fire blight disease that can leave bits of the plants looking brown and scorched. Fortunately, some varieties are resistant to it, especially the Saphyr series of pyracanthas and the tall, red-berried Cotoneaster Cornubia. In 2025 my plants were unaffected, leaving them as healthy tall bones around the garden.
Recommended
After the bitingly cold winter nights of 2022-23, much was said about the need to forswear marginally hardy plants. Here we are three years on and, like settlers on the lower slopes of a volcano after an eruption, we are being tempted to take risks again. If you are in a warm urban garden and want a controllable evergreen, the risk to take is a myrtle, an eminently clippable shrub that has starry white flowers if pruned only after its summer flowering. I rate it but cannot risk it in my colder setting. Elsewhere, Myrtus communis is the safest bet, along with tarentina, its lower-growing subspecies. Against a sunny London wall they survive all but a shocker of a winter. Such are myrtle’s cultural links, especially with love and fidelity, that it is more than a green bone: it is an adornment worth cherishing.
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