page_title: Buxus sempervirens
section_title: Cultivation
hierarchical_section_title: Buxus sempervirens / Cultivation
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Alden Biesen, französischer Garten mit Kapelle im Hintergrund English: Castle Alden Biesen, french garden with chapel in background
context_page_description: Buxus sempervirens, the common box, European box, or boxwood, is a species of flowering plant in the genus Buxus, native to western and southern Europe, northwest Africa, and southwest Asia, from southern England south to northern Morocco, and east through the northern Mediterranean region to Turkey. Buxus colchica of western Caucasus and B. hyrcana of northern Iran and eastern Caucasus are commonly treated as synonyms of B. sempervirens.
context_section_description: In Britain, four Roman burials featured coffins containing sprays of the evergreen box, a practice unattested elsewhere in Europe. Box leaves have also been found from several towns, villas and farmsteads in Roman Britain, indicating ornamental planting. 
  Box remains a very popular ornamental plant in gardens, being particularly valued for topiary and hedges because of its small leaves, evergreen nature, tolerance of close shearing, and scented foliage. The scent is not to everyone's liking: the herbalist John Gerard found it "evill and lothsome" and Daniel Defoe recounts that at Hampton Court Palace Queen Anne had the box hedging removed because she found its odour offensive.
  In the American South, it has sometimes been called "rich man's hedge," and was often used to anchor the landscape plantings on either side of the front door of a house. The scent, most pungent on warm summer days, is not found disagreeable by all, despite its having been likened to cat urine.
  Several cultivars have been selected, including 'Argenteo-variegata' and 'Marginata' with variegated foliage; such "gilded box" received a first notice in John Parkinson's Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629). 'Vardar Valley', a slow-growing particularly hardy semi-dwarf cultivar, was selected in 1935 by the American botanist Edward Anderson in the upper Vardar valley and sent to the Arnold Arboretum for evaluation.
  The following varieties and cultivars have gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit:-
  B. sempervirens 'Elegantissima'
  B. sempervirens 'Latifolia Maculata'
caption: Box topiary in the garden of Alden Biesen Castle, Belgium
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