Learning the Valley: Excursions into the Shenandoah Valley

Hedges

H E D G E S 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 70 LEARNING THE VALLEY lovewithboxwoodandused,andoverused,iteverywhere,impartingtohisreconstructed village a formality and gentility its ancestor never possessed. Statusconscious 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 gardeners are said to have clipped valley hedges for free, taking the cuttings and sticking them in river sandbars and banks, where they rapidly put out roots and,provided they weren’t washed away in floods,provided plants to sell to aspiring gentry. English boxwood’s compact nature lent itself much more to these practices than did American boxwood. Thus, minuscule hedges, which seem but months old, may prove decades older than their taller neighbors,whose ragged appearances makes them seem senescent.My uncle had such shin-high hedges of box lining the paths of his formal garden. When he died, the people who bought his place uprooted a two-hundred-year-old garden and planted grass instead. Not that uprooting boxwoods is an easy job. When Celia decided her fifteenyear -old hedge of English box had to go,we thought a morning would suffice.By noon,however,we’d managed to remove but one plant,and that only after hooking a chain around its roots and dragging it out with a pickup. Long after those who planted them have themselves been planted and forgotten, boxwoods live on,as in Sehorn Hollow on House Mountain’s flank.There,on a slight rise looking west toward North Mountain, the house burned so long ago both chimney and cellar have disappeared. Tree-sized and ragged, the boxes alone remain, giving a vague sense of where...