This week, we take a look at the humble box.
Sorry, folks. Had to. I'm a Dad.
Right, the buxus, or box. More commonly used today for hedgerows, and a staple of the English garden, the box is geometric, hard wearing, easy to maintain, and evergreen. It's easy to see why it has been popular for over two thousand years.
For Romans, the primary use of boxwood was for flutes, and (like abies, or fir, last week) buxus can often be translated as 'flute'. It was such a good material for flutes that one Latin author, Statius (from the late first century CE), even says that the god Bacchus' pipe is made of boxwood. In the Roman Trees Database, 'flute' or 'pipes' are recorded in association with boxwood 18 times out of the 60 total references.
However, what we are going to look at today are instances of buxus and architecture. Pliny the Younger, in one of his many letters to friends, writes that his exercise ground is bordered with buxus:
"The exercise ground is bordered in boxwood, or rosemary where the boxwood does not grow well. For box, when it is protected by buildings, grows well, but when it is exposed to the heavens and the wind and the seaspray (although it stands a good distance away from the sea), it withers." (Letters 2.17)
This is the beginning of a description of an exercise ground bordering a gardens (we might imagine some sort of running track, perhaps), with a low exterior border. The use of box hedging, or the rosemary shrub, suggests a border with a (realistic) maximum height of three feet. Rosemary can, at a push, grow to four feet, but requires optimal conditions to do so. The concern seems to be primarily based on aesthetic, rather than scent, since rosemary and box have a reasonably similar growth pattern and appearance. Both plants withstand pruning and containing to a particular height, which would have provided a low border around the exercise ground, partitioning it from the outside, and disguising it. Pliny could look out on his gardens from his triclinium, a dining room, and clearly appreciated the ornamentality of his garden within the exercise ground.
There are other examples in the Roman world of buxus being used ornamentally. In Pliny the Elder's Natural History (the Elder Pliny was the Younger Pliny's uncle, and died in the same eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii), we are told that it is 'used extensively for ornamental gardening' (16.70). Martial, in his Epigrams, writes that the Porticus Europae is lined with buxeta, another word for boxwood, and this space too is used as an exercise ground.
For millennia, boxwood has been a very attractive wood to use in architectural garden spaces, and lends itself to easy pruning and care within an ornamental garden. It was used in Rome's public and private spaces, and was fundamental in the development of topiary... To be continued...