Derby Day is the traditional date to cut your box hedges, which means I am only ten days late, and counting, since I am not half way round all the box yet. I write 'all the box',but in truth there isn't very much, just enough to remind me why I don't have more. I am not temperamentally suited to formal clipping, and shrubs under my care tend to grow larger year by year. Things that are supposed to be neat, geometric shapes get fatter and more cushiony with each passing season, while everything else simply gets bigger and more joyously sprawling. I am always amazed when I see plants in other people's gardens, like Philadelphus and dwarf lilac, that have been topiarised into neat domes. Given the choice between Abelia cushions and Abelia grown au naturel, the twiggy look wins in my garden. Even the Osmanthus delavayi which is supposed to be forming a giant ball at one corner of a bed, an idea I copied from Christopher Lloyd, is bulging out over the lawn because I am not disciplined enough with the secateurs.
I have sometimes thought that gardens filled with neat formal hedges and topiary are for owners who can afford to employ gardeners. They are not hobbyists' gardens, places where those who love plants can play with the objects of their affections, but places to inhabit, viewing the fruits of other peoples' labour. Maybe there is even an element of conspicuous consumption, showing off to your friends and business associates that you can employ the staff to do all this intricate, time consuming and repetitive work. But that isn't necessarily true. The lovely garden at Herterton House in Northumberland which we visited a couple of years ago has been built and maintained by its owners, and when we went there we met owner Frank Lawley, who must be into his seventies, balanced a long way up a ladder in September trimming one of his many hedges, and apparently enjoying himself.
I don't dislike cutting the box, I just lack the application to get all the way round as often as I ought to. This summer it got particularly bad, since I didn't manage to finish cutting all of it the last time I tackled it, and entirely missed some tricky bits where it was overhung by roses, resulting in some random edged patches of different lengths. If ever an area of garden screamed I am a work in progress/renovation project, it has been our box edged rose bed this year. I'm having to take the sides hard back as well in places, since two sides of the square have ended up about twice as wide as they really ought to be. Even now I am not brave enough to take the sides back as far as I really should, but I am trying to reduce the width of the hedge to a size it is possible for somebody with fairly short legs to step over it.
The scorched, circular pale patches along the side next to the lawn are not a mystery. They are exactly at feline bum height, and I know the cause is the cats spraying. Indeed, Our Ginger came and gave the front of the hedge a top-up while I was cutting the top, and I had to switch to cutting the edge of the lawn for an hour to give it time to dry. I wish they wouldn't do that, but it is in cats' nature to scent mark their territory with urine, so it's only when they do it indoors that I feel entitled to be cross. The damage to the box looks bad, but is superficial, and if you cut out the scorched tips the wood soon regenerates from lower down. I am more concerned about a few mottled, pale patches on the top, which were slow to come into growth. Are they box blight? Or did I trim that part of the hedge before just as the weather turned hot, or cold, so that the newly cut ends were damaged? I am really not sure. I have looked at the pictures of blighted box on the RHS website, and my hedge, and it could be blight, or it might not be. As the effects of the cat pee show, and the miserable appearance of box that has been unlucky enough to be trimmed just before a heatwave, all sorts of things can produce grey and shrivelled leaves on a box hedge.
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