Blog de Puree

After purchasing and planting our ‘Winter Gem’ boxwood shrubs from Lowe’s last year (See last year’s blog post here), we are happy to see that our border experiment is working.

To start, we planted what we called the “Boxwood shade gardens,” one on each side of our front steps to fill in the area that was formerly taken up by overgrown Yews. We planted a variety of flowers and flowering plants to provide color from early spring into mid fall. You can read about our shade gardens here.

Once the flowers were planted, life with these two gardens became a simple matter of routine maintenance, such as weeding, chipping and so on.

Now, more than a year later, the boxwoods themselves are thriving and we have nearly achieved the look we were going for in the original post, which was to have a continuous line of boxwood to server as a planting bed border. The boxwoods have not completely filled in yet, but we expect that to take another year or two because we did not put them in root ball to root ball. However, the ‘Winter Gem’ varietal does grow to three feet spread, so we’re not too concerned about the space filling in. Also, they were trimmed in the spring and already will easily need another trimming in the spring of next year.