Pinching Box

Pinching box: it’s a mysterious phrase. It might be an eccentric sort of fisticuffs, or an exquisite Asian torture, but in fact it’s a peaceful horticultural task, pleasant, solitary and satisfying.
Each spring, my box bushes put out a yellow-green froth of new growth, tiny furled leaves that curl around themselves like empty peas. And each year, in the chilly spring sunlight, I pinch back the tender stems, asking the bush to spend its energy in more interior ways, to make a denser, bushier plant. It’s one of my favorite chores. 
As Henry Mitchell once wrote, a gardener’s passions are serial. One year it’s rugosa roses, and wherever you look, that’s all you see, because that’s all you think about. It’s also all you want to hear about. How can your friend want to talk about hemerocallis? Hasn’t she seen the gorgeous, crinkled, heartbreakingly intimate petals of “Gens Munk”? For rugosa rose is all there is, for you, right then.
This year my passion is Buxus: box. I like the neat briskness of its single syllable, I like the mysterious eccentricity of the letter x. And of course I love the shrub itself, with its tidy compact habit and its obliging evergreen foliage, dense, glossy and problem-free. Modest, sturdy, discreet, it’s best-known as a handsome foil for showier plants, or as a hedge, or a backdrop for statuary. But just as you might see a painting for years before an unnoticed element of the composition suddenly rises up and claims your attention, so I found the decorous, conventional and ubiquitous box suddenly claimed mine.
Twenty-five years ago we moved into an old white clapboard farmhouse, guarded by ancient and towering sugar maples. These cast deep shade across the front of the house, which was lined with dreary, conventional foundation-planting: scrawny azaleas, droopy Andromedas and dismal yew, underplanted by sterile pachysandra. Design by Edward Gorey.
As a gardening neophyte, I knew better than everyone else, and I ripped most of this out. I planted lilacs and viburnum, and left the andromeda and pachysandra. The front of the house was bare all winter, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was flowers, and I never used the front door.
The back of the house is where the action is - perennial borders, kitchen garden and, of course, the back door. Some years later, wanting structure, I planted box there. Two large and handsome Buxus Sempervirens flank the back door, where they lend (I hope) some dignity to this modest portal. On each side of the white gate is a Buxus Suffruticosa Sempervirens - English, or Edging Box, small-leaved and slow-growing, enchantingly neat in its habit, dense and compact. In the corner of the Kitchen Garden, is a small, low, glossy Korean Box (Buxus Microphylla koreana.) This has a cheerful, hoydenish habit, like a mop, and turns a bright chartreuse in the winter.
Once the bushes were planted, I realised that my buxus responsibilities had just begun. Pruning box turned out to be an art, one I approached with trepidation. My friend Ellen was no help. “I just pinch it every time I walk past,” she told me carelessly: the kind of comment made by someone very experienced, and useless to a nervous beginner. Where did she make the pinches, and how big were they? How often did she walk past? 
An English pruning book, Craftsmanship in Yew and Box, explained that shape was crucial. The plant must taper upward for sunlight to reach the bottom, which is why the great ancient box hedges have a stately pyramidal form. To create this shape – since leaning over the bush you can lose perspective – you use a wooden form. I nailed laths together to make a big slanted L, with an angle of about 50 degrees. Leaning this against the plant I began hesitantly to pinch.
For you don’t clip box. Just as important as the shape is the method of pruning. Clippers produce unsightly white dashes throughout the foliage; the edges of the leaves and stems turn a hard and unpleasant white afterwards, no matter how carefully you wield the shears. Instead you pinch, with index finger and thumb. This is slow, and rather hard on your fingers, but it’s a pleasant task, and one you can do early, when there isn’t much else to do.
Standing in the damp bed, still in a winter jacket, I take the tender shoots between finger and thumb and I like to think of the gallant ladies of Dunbarton Oaks. The big Washington garden, one of Beatrix Farrand’s masterpieces, contains a great deal of handsome box. I’d heard that, during World War II, much of the gardening staff was called up, and neighborhood ladies stepped into the breach. In their pleated skirts and pearls they pinched back the box, shoot by tender shoot, personal contributions to the War Effort.
But what about the barren front of the house, neglected and untended all these years? Last summer, my daughter was married at home, on the lawn. The ceremony would be by the White Border, beside the fragrant and blooming rugosa Schneekoppe: perfect. But every single guest would walk across the lawn, past the dismal front door, the spindly lilacs and viburnums, the dull pachysandra. Buxus began beating a refrain in my brain.
I began seeing Box. I saw box hedges. I saw topiary in photographs. I noticed huge bushes flanking ancient doorways. I met a collector of old box, buying it from estates. He has a property full of these noble centenarians, a private Forest of Arden. He doesn’t pinch them back, he said.
Never? I asked. He shook his head.
What do they look like, I asked, unclipped?
Like clouds, he answered. 
Now I lamented. Twenty-five years, I thought. I could have had twenty-five-year-old box bushes, dense, luxuriant, graceful, green floating clouds flanking the doorway. Instead, I had twenty-five-year-old pachysandra beds, sterile, stupid and common, which I now detested.
Two weeks before the wedding, talking with Joe, my gardening ally, I rued aloud my lack of box - though I knew I couldn’t put English box in deep shade.
“But American box,” Joe said, “does fine in shade.”
“It does?” I asked. The stealthy beat began in my brain.
Joe nodded.
“I’d need two big ones,” I said. Buxus Buxus Buxus.  
“I can get two big ones,” Joe said.
“Right away?” I asked.
“This afternoon.”
The bushes went in within hours. I hoped they’d look as though they’d been there for decades, but of course they did not: one thing money cannot buy is established plants. These looked as new arrivals always do: somewhat unkempt, but cheerful and well-intentioned. I didn’t care. I loved them.
The wedding, like all weddings, was enchanting. And in twenty-five years I’ll have huge, dreamlike, green clouds flanking the front door. In the meantime, I think about the boxes. I walk several times a day around the house to look at them. Hoping they’re growing. Silently urging them on. Wondering why my friends want to talk about rugosas.