Box or not?

The garden is looking especially lush. We seem to be swaying between a sunny day and then a rainy day, which makes for great growing conditions in the garden, but does mean we need to cut the grass in the walled garden at least once a week. I like to leave the slope a bit longer, and I’m leaving part of it again this year to create a meadow. Having the wildflowers popping up is a colourful attraction for the butterflies.

We’ve got lots of little, and a few big, jobs we’d like to do in the garden this year, we just need to start to prioritise them. One thing we do have on our mind is the box topiary trees. I love the structure they bring to the garden, but they are terribly hard to protect against the dreaded box tree caterpillars. This year they seem to have started earlier, and are quite prolific. We know we could replace the box with Ilex, but these would take some years to establish themselves. So we need to think about our options.