Learning the Valley by Leland John;

Author:Leland, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

HEDGES

Stone walls grow only where stone was so plentiful as to require moving. But almost all settlers needed something to wall out intrusive people and animals. The cheaper and less troublesome something, the better. So many turned to hedges as leafy barriers to trespass. Just which plants best served as hedge material was contentious, favored plants commanding high prices until edged out by a new miracle vegetable, many of which escaped cultivation and still linger in valley fields and forests.

Virginians favor boxwood hedges, and not just any box: English box is denser and fuller than its leggier, more open American cousin. Those who know can sort the two kinds by their leaves, the American being lankier than the rounder English, the plants apparently intent on representing their respective national characters. I learned this distinction by marrying a Virginian who could walk a Lexington street and tell at a glance whether or not the hedge we passed passed social muster. I learned the difference, too late to save our marriage, but, to those even less in the know than I, I pass as an expert on the difference between a fat John Bull and a lean Uncle Sam of a hedge.

Not that the distinction’s worth the making: American boxwood’s a misnomer. Both it and English boxwood not only hale from Europe, they’re close kin, being but cultivars of the same species, Buxus sempevirens, a plant native to Europe and North Africa. And, sssh, I’ll whisper this so unsuspecting Virginians won’t overhear, another name for both is common boxwood. English box may be the more compact of the two, reaching a height of three to five feet and often kept by trimming to only inches high, while the so-called American box can grow twenty feet high. To complicate matters, there really are American boxwoods, but they grow in the Caribbean and South America, not the middle Atlantic states. And even if you could grow it as far north as Virginia, Puerto Rico box just hasn’t the cachet of English box.

While genteel Virginians may have enjoyed perambulating their boxwood gardens, they didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as their descendants think they did. Historians credit master gardener Arthur Shurcliff with popularizing boxwood. When designing Williamsburg, Virginia’s gardens in the 1930s, Shurcliff fell in love with boxwood and used, and overused, it everywhere, imparting to his reconstructed village a formality and gentility its ancestor never possessed. Status-conscious Virginians ignore or never knew that Shurcliff based his gardens not on Tidewater designs but on those of colonial North Carolina, a region some Virginians have long looked askance at, colonial planter William Byrd calling his southern neighbor, “Lubberland.” Byrd’s famous James River plantation, Westover, has old boxwoods large enough to be, ahem, American. To rub it in even further, some botanists question English boxwood’s right to be called English, thinking it may have been brought to the islands by the Romans.

Boxwood’s appeal is that it loves to be clipped into formal hedges and bizarre topiaries. Enterprising

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