sweet box

Walking into the office at work I was greeted by a powerful waft of sweet, spicy scent.  It was the sweet box that lives just outside the office door.  I am a great fan of these small to medium evergreen shrubs.  They have neat glossy foliage, not unlike box, and in the middle of winter produce small white flowers over several weeks that are intensely fragrant.  They are also attractive to insects, and on a mild day in February when the bees are flying you will see them working their way round the Sarcococca.

My favourite in my own garden is S. confusa, simply because it has done the best out of those I've tried.  It has oval leaves, shiny black berries, and in a silty semi-shaded border quite close to the ditch has readily suckered to make a dense rounded shrub about 0.7m by 0.5m.  I see it is Robin Lane Fox's choice in his recent book of essays, and he advocates clipping it after flowering to restrict the height.  I haven't found that necessary so far.  Less successful with me has been S. hookeriana digyna, which is planted in the shade of a wild gean in a border that supports ferns successfully and I don't think is too dry.  This has remained rather straggly, and not grown at anything like the rate of S. confusa.  It has longer leaves than S. confusa, and is the favoured variety of Graham Stuart Thomas.

They are happy in shade, and will even accept dry shade according to Allen Paterson in his useful book Plants for Shade, first published back in 1981 but still worth picking up if you come across it.  Chalky and limy soils are also fine.  They are pretty hardy: mine came through last winter and this one so far without any dieback, though I think I may have lost S. ruscifolia.  Robin Lane Fox back in 1982, when the memory of the 1981-2 winter was still fresh, lamented that he lost his Sarcococca, but then that was an exceptionally bad winter, when the temperature in Oxford fell to minus 20C, colder than it was in Moscow, and the mature evergreen oak in the New College gardens entirely defoliated.