Blog de Puree

Two months after making my original order for 25 boxwood shrubs with Lowes, they finally arrived. It was the wrong cultivar and size, but as it is August, with the growing season closing fast and the fact that this variety is still evergreen in our particular zone, I threw up my hands and bought them anyway.

Despite the fact that it was one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve ever had, which includes a pathetic lack of communication from the manager who made the order and his poor handling of trying to ship the plants I wanted from other stores, he did right by me in the end, and sold me 3-gallon $19 plants for the price of the 1-gallon $6 plants.

So, instead of the Buxus microphylla japonica ‘Wintergreen’ boxwoods, which are very cold hardy, great for creating hedges and great for pruning, we now have the Buxus microphylla ‘Winter Gem’ variety. The Winter Gem is almost as hardy as the former, and is also great for hedges and trimming. While the differences are small, especially as you compare other details between the two, they are important for serious and semi-serious gardeners and growers.

When we went to pick them up, the manager who had sold us the shrubs asked us if we had a pickup truck to bring them all home. “Nah,” I calmly said. “I’ve got a VW Golf.” He raised an eyebrow and offered to watch those that couldn’t fit in the car for the first trip, until we came back for the 2nd trip. The employee who helped us load them from the rack to our VW Golf told us that his buddy, who happened to be hanging around, was skeptical that we’d be able to fit them all in at once. But they didn’t know what our little bat could do. (That’s what we call the black Golf.) In the end, we squeezed 24 in the back, creating a small boxwood forest and fit one, well, check the pictures.

(24 3-gallon boxwood shrubs crammed into the back of our trusty VW Golf.)

(And the final shrub in the front of the car, with Randye.)

In the end, Randye and I are quite pleased with the outcome. I spent five hours on Sunday morning planting all 25 of them in front of the house, in the spot where the gigantic yew bushes used to grow. Now we have two rounded border areas for planting tall and colorful shade-tolerant flowers that will bloom from spring to late summer. And when those die back, we still have the evergreen color of the boxwoods. Of course, it’s all according to our master yard plan, which I’ve included at the end of this post. Here’s how I planted the shrubs. (Queue music, please.)

(The front of the house, before I started, and how it looked for weeks before the shrubs arrived. Bare and ugly.)

(Another shot, before I started at 8:30 a.m. The growth that you do see here is weeds.)

(I started with digging the ditch on the left side of the front steps, battling my way through residual roots systems from the old yew bushes)

(Then I dug the ditch on the right side of the front steps. The ditches on both sides were about a foot deep—the height of the 3-gallon pots. As I was planting so many shrubs together, about 4 to 6 inches apart (almost root ball to root ball), it was easiest to just dig a trench in the shape that I wanted to plant the shrubs.)

(The finished product, about 4-and-a-half hours later. The shrubs make a gentle curve around the sides of the house, creating deep planting beds behind in which to grow tall and colorful flowers. The shrubs will grow in, creating a continuous wall of shrub that creates a solid evergreen border for the new flower bed.)

(Here’s a layout, courtesy of the magazine Cottage Living, where we got the idea to have flower beds outside the windows bordered by evergreen boxwood shrubs.)

(With a year or two of growth and some careful pruning, our shrubs and flower bed should look a little like this photo, also courtesy of Cottage Living. We’re going to plant a variety of tall flowers that will bloom in the spring, mid or late summer. We’ll also probably plant a low purplish ground cover in front of the shrubs to create a sense of colorful depth and drama.)