Guide to Planting a Boxwood Hedge

How to Use Boxwood Hedges for Landscaping

Boxwood hedges are a classic design element of both formal and informal or cottage-style gardens. They function as the structure or “bones” of a garden, contrast for beds of annuals and perennials, physical barriers or living fences and evergreen interest in colder climates.

If you want to plant a significant amount of boxwood hedging on your property the cost can add up quickly. Though it takes a lot more time, starting your own boxwoods from cuttings is easy to do, can save you a lot of money and allow you to be a lot more ambitious with your garden than you otherwise could be. 

Structure & Form

Boxwood hedges provide a backdrop of defined shape and uniform texture that contrasts with the colors and soft billowy shapes of annual and perennial beds that are often what people think of and focus on when they create a garden. 

This structure is one of the elements that gives your garden what I like to think of as “legibility.” It makes a garden space feel intentional and helps the individual plants and design elements stand out from each other. Without it, a garden can feel muddled, like a jumbled mess with nowhere for your eyes to rest where individual plants, flowers, textures and colors get lost. 

There are many ways to use boxwood hedges as structure. They can be clipped into formal shapes or left somewhat soft, limbed up like small trees with their trunks exposed or organized in free-form clumps and cloud pruned. Individual boxwoods can also be shaped as topiary, placed along the openings or corners of a larger hedge, or emerging out of the interiors of flower beds.

Evergreen Interest

Many of us that live in colder climates think of a garden as something that comes to life in spring and disappears in fall. This is more or less true if your garden is made up of mostly deciduous trees and shrubs, perennials and annual flowers. But your garden doesn’t have to be a barren wasteland in cold weather. 

Populating your garden with evergreen structure creates something beautiful - and green - to look at outside your home straight through the winter. Boxwood hedges perform this function beautifully, though check the variety information before you plant. Some boxwood varieties are better than others at both surviving harsh winters and maintaining a true green color over winter, while others take on a copper tinge as the weather gets cold. 

For more garden design ideas, check out my guide to growing creeping thyme.

Separation

Hedges of any kind visually and physically separate the various elements of your garden or property. They keep your space neat and organized, hide its more practical elements from view and direct how people move through the space. They’re essentially a living alternative to a fence. 

Boxwoods can even be better looking, longer-lasting and cheaper than many fencing materials, especially if you start with very small plants or propagate your own boxwood seedlings from cuttings. Most varieties grow 3-4 feet in height, although both dwarf and taller upright or columnar varieties are available, which make boxwood hedges perfect for separating spaces without completely blocking out views. 

Boxwood hedges can: 

• Line the edges of your property or serve as foundation plantings in front of your house or other structures. 
• Line the sides of garden pathways.
• Enclose a vegetable garden, individual perennial beds or compost area. 
• Create ornamental arrangements like a formal parterre or knot garden or informal clusters of shrubs and topiary. 

Materials and Tools you Need to Plant a Boxwood Hedge

• Boxwood plants
• Measuring tape
• Wooden or plastic stakes & string 
• Auger, tiller or shovel 
• Mulch of your choice

How to Plant a Boxwood Hedge: Step-by-Step

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Some sources encourage you to add organic matter and amendments to your planting hole, but it’s better to backfill with only the native soil to encourage the roots of your plant to reach beyond the planting hole itself. 

Caring for your Boxwood Hedge

Getting your Boxwood Hedge Established

Boxwoods, like most plants, require a period of “getting established” during which they need extra attention from the gardener as they grow accustomed to their environment and get their roots growing and settled into the soil. After this time, boxwoods are relatively low maintenance. For shrubs like boxwood, this getting established period can last 2-3 years. 

To help the boxwoods in your hedge get established: 

• Keep them well watered throughout the growing season, giving them 1 inch of water per week, especially during any periods of drought. 
• Maintain a layer of mulch around the roots of the plant but don’t bury the stems in mulch. 
• Regularly weed around the base of the plants to prevent weeds from competing with the boxwoods. 
• Fertilize every year either in fall or spring with a balanced slow-release granular fertilizer.

If you have a lot of boxwood and other evergreen hedging, you may want to consider setting up some sort of drip irrigation to ensure they are evenly watered during this time.

Surviving the First few Winters

Boxwoods are winter hardy to zone 4 or 5, depending on the variety, and should survive most winters with little to no damage especially when winters are relatively mild with sufficient snow cover. 

However, hardiness builds up over time and winter damage can occur in harsh winters especially when your boxwoods are small and if they are exposed to high winds or situated close to a road.

If you live in a cold climate, taking especially good care of your boxwood hedges for their first few winters is crucial to minimize the number of plants you may lose over time. Be sure to:

• Continue watering your hedge into the late fall. When the first frosts are expected, check that the ground underneath your boxwoods is moist and water them if it’s dry. Plants are better at handling freezing cold temperatures when their root systems are moist. 
• Provide your hedge with some winter protection like wrapping them with burlap and/or a thick layer of leaves over the roots. 
• If your boxwoods are planted close to a road they may also benefit from some additional physical protection - like tall stakes - that will be easily visible to cars and snow ploughs.

It may seem counter-intuitive but the biggest winter threat to your boxwood hedge is not the snow. Snow provides some protection for hardy plants, acting like a blanket. Although you may want to brush very heavy loads of snow off your plants. 

Be prepared to lose some plants. It’s easy to have a few extra boxwood seedlings on hand if you start some from cuttings.

The bigger danger to your baby boxwoods are mid-winter and very early spring winds - particularly once the snow has melted. These winds can easily damage the shallow root systems of small boxwoods and dry out the plants, leaving them with a brown winter burn. Make sure your boxwood hedge remains protected until the weather warms up in spring. 

Pruning your Boxwood Hedge

Boxwoods are relatively low-maintenance plants. However if you want to keep your hedge looking tidy or if you want it to take on a particular shape you will need to prune at least 1-2 times a year. 

• If you want your boxwood hedge loosely shaped, give the plants one prune after the weather has warmed up but before or just as new growth emerges.
• If you want your boxwood hedge clipped in tight, formal shapes you will need to prune more frequently over the growing season. 
• Most pruning involves “shaping cuts” which focus on the exterior of the plant and determine the overall shape of your hedge. Whatever shape you choose, ensure the sun can reach the leaves on the bottom of the plant. The sides of the hedge should be either completely vertical or slightly wider at the bottom than at the top. 
• If your hedges are tightly clipped, you may also need to make “thinning cuts” that remove some branches from the interior of the plants. Otherwise, tightly clipped boxwood can become crowded and the interior branches can die back. 

A Boxwood or any other Hedge is a Long Game

I created the hedge you see in these photos with boxwoods I grew from cuttings. The boxwood seedlings in the pictures were two years old at planting time. 

No matter the size of the boxwoods you plant, a hedge is a long term project. It will take several years before you have a substantial hedge that provides the structure, evergreen interest or privacy you want it to. 

You can try to get around this by planting larger, more mature, boxwoods. But large plants are a significant investment, have a harder time getting established and require more initial care than smaller ones. It’s worth considering planting smaller boxwoods, and even ones you have propagated yourself, as you may be surprised at how quickly small plants catch up to larger ones.

If you’re working on a budget, I recommend getting your hedge plants in as early as possible in the process of designing your space and as you wait for them to reach a mature size fill in the space around them temporarily with annuals or short-lived perennials. This gives you a chance to experiment with plants or colors to see what you like and what does well in the microclimate of your garden.